Arranged Love (7 page)

‘You want a Barbie dream wedding set with Stacie and Todd.’

‘Dad! You already gifted it to me on my seventh birthday,’ I reminded, my anger dissipating at the fond memory.

‘We are talking about her wedding, not her doll’s wedding,’ corrected Mom. She was busy planting strawberry crops on her farm, but her ears were clued in on our conversation.

‘You want to go on an all girls’ tour to Europe,’ guessed Dad, taking inspiration from Bollywood movie plots.

‘That would indeed be fabulous, but …’

‘Is it your art? Do you want to take time off and paint for a while?’

I would have loved to take time off and paint forever, but I knew what Mom was about to say.

‘The store is already stacked with her canvasses. I get a bigger house if she gets to paint more,’ demanded Mom.

‘Okay, I think I have nailed it this time,’ claimed Dad, banging his fist on the table. ‘You want to live by yourself for a year. Like
in your own apartment, independently.’

‘Why are you putting these rubbish ideas in her mind,’ complained Mom, clearly not in favour of unnecessary frivolity or freedom. She had even perfected the land usage on her farm so that every unit of her farm was profitable.

‘Don’t tell me it’s the new age stereotype
I want to be known as someone before getting known as someone’s wife
,’ remarked Dad.

When I shook my head, he raised his hands in despair to gesture that he had given up.

I rejoiced at my victory, almost forgetting that I now needed to tell him what I wanted. ‘I want to marry a guy I love rather than love a guy I marry,’ I said, twisting the truth slightly and keeping Jay under wraps.

‘Ah, that is a cliché I could never have guessed,’ said Dad, waving his hand dismissively.

‘Can we get a little more serious here if the father and daughter have finished playing games?’ Mom never liked being left out, but she never liked being party to the fun either.

‘In our generation, the saying was “it’s better to marry a person who loves you than to marry a person you love”,’ jabbed Dad. It was hard to get him to be serious.

‘What does this instant generation know about love?’ attacked Mom. ‘Food, loans, messages, henna and sex—everything is instant today. This generation needs arranged marriages or else their marriages will result in instant divorces,’ she said, expounding her philosophy.

‘Arranged marriages are a by-product of the discriminating caste system,’ I protested, on behalf of the entire instant generation. ‘They were designed to prevent children from marrying outside the community.’

‘And love marriages are a by-product of authors’ and movie producers’ plots,’ replied Mom.

I looked at my mom, blew at a ringlet falling carelessly on my face and gave her a ‘what do you know about love’ dare.

‘I remember my first one,’ she said, taking the challenge. ‘I was only sixteen and his voice had just begun to crack,’ she reminisced.

I had never heard Mom talk about her youth before. It was hard to imagine Mom as anything but a mom.

‘He would come to his balcony every evening and watch me pick the line-dried laundry. Soon, we moved houses and before I knew, I was skipping classes to have tea with this other guy in college.’

‘You never told me about this college fling,’ accused Pa.

‘It was irrelevant,’ justified Mom. ‘Out of sight, out of mind, and that’s exactly my point. A fling at this age is nothing but a fleeting fluttering of our fragile hearts.’

‘Ma, I am not seventeen, and I can tell the difference between a passing crush and true love,’ I voiced my defence.

‘You love what you see, but it all changes once you are married.’ Ma tried to explain how people put up their best foot forward during the courtship period, but it’s the worst that we need to be able to live with for a relationship to survive.

Like I don’t watch movies and serials. Of course, everyone knows that stuff. ‘How do you guarantee that the same doesn’t happen in an arranged marriage?’ I argued.

‘No one can guarantee that a marriage will succeed, but it’s about managing risks,’ she preached. ‘In arranged marriages, since the family and cultural background matches, the chances of incompatibility are minimized.’

Bull shit, I thought to myself. ‘Who goes for arranged marriages these days Mom? It is so archaic. Totally pre-Internet.’

‘You mean, just because you were born with an email id, you get to choose the email id you will marry?’

Well, technically, I got my email id on my thirteenth birthday,
but I knew what she meant. Finally she was seeing my POV. I told you, my mom was smart.

‘You will love Deepak,’ Dad chimed in confidently, in the hope to strike truce. ‘I told you, you were never very receptive to new foods at first.’

I could have let the love vs arranged argument drop, but the mention of Deepak’s name left me with no choice. Dad had to know the truth now. The entire truth.

‘I love someone else, Pa,’ I mumbled, facing the ground. I could not look him in the eye for I had told him otherwise just a few weeks back.

‘How can that be? Your FB relationship status says you are single,’ intervened Mom, but Dad motioned her to keep quiet. Normally this wouldn’t shut Mom up, but her raspberry crops chose the same moment to mature, thus diverting her attention into harvesting them before they went waste.

Dad held my face in his hands and gazed in my eyes as if searching for something. He was not angry with me. He was not hurt either. He was full of love. I wondered if he was experiencing the ‘Father of the Bride’ moment. ‘Oh! But I still get to hug you, and kiss you, and camp out with you, and sleep with you … I mean when he is travelling for work,’ Dad sought reassurance like an insecure little child who was being left behind at home while his parents went out to party.

I hugged him tight and started planting quick kisses on his cheek. He showered the kisses back, both of us trying to outkiss each other. ‘I win the race,’ I declared after a while.

‘Who is this lucky young gentleman who is going to compete in the kissing race with me?’ he asked.

This wasn’t going so bad. I felt my confidence rising. ‘He is Jayant,’ I replied. ‘Jayant Guy.’ I completed.

‘I have never heard that surname,’ doubted Ma. ‘Which
community does he belong to? Is it a modernized variant of that movie producer Subhash Ghai’s surname?’

This was the part I dreaded the most. ‘It’s G.U.Y as in ‘the cable Guy’ or ‘the Guy next door,’ I spelled out. ‘He is half Indian, half American,’ I elaborated.

I knew Mom would blow her fuse any time now, but it was Pa’s approval that mattered to me. I waited for his reaction, his shock, an outrage or even humour at having chosen a funny surname, but all I got was a pin-drop silence. I looked into his eyes and all his dreams for me flashed past me. The dream of playing cricket with his future son-in-law, of creating a family music band, flying kites on 15 August, of finding the fourth bridge partner. Even if Jay learned the technicality and complexity of cricket, and Hindi music, and kite flying, and card playing, he would still be 13,000+ kilometres away in the US. One by one, I saw his dreams die.

‘Are you sure this Jay Guy loves you?’ Mom asked thoughtfully, a little concerned. She had closed the laptop momentarily and was trying to deal with this sudden twist in the tale.

I nodded.

‘Does his mom observe Karwa Chauth?’ she inquired. She had figured that if his surname was American, it must be his mom who was Indian.

I told her that his mom was from the south and perhaps not very religious. In any case, I was not a big fan of fasting myself.

‘Would he be willing to compromise and settle in India or make the effort to learn the
Hanuman Chalisa
?’ she interrogated further.

‘I don’t know, Ma,’ I replied, toying with my ring, slipping it in and out of my finger.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew the answers.

‘Everyone falls in love. Falling in love is easy and falling out even easier,’ she said, looking compassionately at me. ‘What is hard is staying in love. It requires understanding, trust, time and effort.’

I knew what she was saying made sense and it made me uncomfortable.

‘What’s wrong with Deepak?’ she asked, not the one to give up easily.

‘For one, he is an IITian,’ I wanted to scream, but there was no way I could tell them why I disliked IITians or what had transpired between me and the IIT guy I was dating four years ago.

‘Other than the fact that I don’t love him, I don’t think Indian boys, especially IITians, have the open-mindedness that I am looking for in my life partner,’ I reasoned, without getting into the specific details for my bias.

‘I was so looking forward to playing with Pappu and Munni,’ said my mom in a resigned tone, bearing a forlorn expression. ‘I had even planted mango trees for them on my farm.’

‘Who are Pappu and Munni?’ I couldn’t help but ask.

‘Your twins, of course,’ she replied and retreated to farming. She had just received some mystery eggs notification from her neighbours which were hatching into white, black, brown and gold chickens.

Dad, who had not uttered a word since I mentioned Guy, also rose to leave. ‘Every girl eventually becomes a replica of her mom as she ages,’ he said. ‘Make sure Jayant likes your mom,’ he faked a smile and left.

Me become like Mom. Impossible! We were the complete opposite of each other. Where I saw joy, she saw work. Where I liked clutter, she liked order. While I loved experimenting with my looks, she had never even applied nail polish so as to preserve the natural shine of her nails. Her life was a series of well-planned tasks, completed according to schedule, and mine was like an array of open projects, loose ends and unfinished business. Sometimes I felt she was missing out on all the fun on life as it was meant to be lived.

Can a person change so drastically as they grow old? I shivered at the possibility. There was no way I could see myself tending to farms and livestock with the dedication and sincerity my mom exhibited. It must be the doing of all the expectations from an arranged marriage. Good thing I was not going down that path.

I went up to my room, took out a fresh canvas and started painting. My Facebook status read, ‘Love vs arranged marriage. What would you choose?’

‘Come online,’ I whispered.

‘I will come whichever way you want me to, baby,’ he whispered back dreamily.

Involuntarily, a faint smile spread across my lips. Moments later we were connected via the messiah of LDRs—Skype. ‘Where were you? I have been pinging you for an hour,’ I complained.

‘The laptop must be on mute,’ murmured Jay.

I saw him rub his eyes and clear the eye dirt. It looked like he had just woken up from deep sleep. His hair was all ruffled and his voice still crummy. Thankfully I couldn’t smell the morning breath on video chat.

‘Twenty calls!’ he cried out, suddenly coming to his senses, as he found his laptop screen flooded with my missed call alerts.

I immediately lowered the speaker volume on my laptop, hoping that Mom hadn’t heard him. I knew she was in the next room, perhaps sending return gifts to her farm neighbours.

‘Twenty calls are redundant, don’t you think? I would see a missed call message even after one call,’ said Jay with a grin which soon morphed into a big yawn.

Of course I knew that, but try telling that to a girl who has just gone live about her affair to her parents. She needs to know that her boyfriend loves her more than anything else in the world. Even more
than his sleep. And she needs to know it immediately. ‘Isn’t 1 p.m. on Monday afternoon an unusual time to be sleeping?’ I countered.

‘Had a fucking submission,’ he explained lazily. He then gave me a teasing look and added sulkily, ‘Had to stay up the whole night all by myself.’

Just hearing him talk dirty turned me on. I craved to feel the warmth of his hands around me, the tingling of his fingers on my shoulders, and the wetness of his lips on mine. ‘I miss you so much,’ I said in a low voice, staring longingly at his lips. Oh! But something looked amiss. ‘Why do your lips look swollen like you have been to a marathon snogging session?’ I asked half jokingly.

He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and then blinked again. ‘I was getting kissed by a hot girl in a bikini,’ smiled Jay blissfully and stretched his hands up in the air.

I didn’t ask him if the girl in the bikini was me, for I knew that even though it was just a dream I would be green-eyed if the girl kissing him wasn’t me. Yet the swollen lips were real. I narrowed my eyes suspiciously and searched for lipstick marks on his neck and ears.

‘Hon, stop being jealous like I am hiding a blonde in the closet,’ chided Jay lightheartedly. ‘It’s just a bad case of sun burn.’

I had never seen anyone get anything enlarged due to sun exposure before. Why would actresses spend millions on increasing their cup size if sun bathing is all that they needed to do? ‘Americans keep a second car for random recreation.’ Neha’s words echoed in my mind. What if Jay really was cruising a blonde race car? OMG! What if the blonde car was Denise and she was there with him right now. After all, I could only see the upper half of his body on the laptop camera.

He must have seen the doubt and shock splashed on my face. ‘You gotta trust me, honey,’ he said casually, but I could see from the way he rolled his eyes that he was beginning to get irritated.

Trust. Oh yeah. Mom had said that trust was important to keep the love alive, but then she hadn’t met Denise. In her time, the typical other girl in TV serials was a cunning, conspiring, rich and spoiled saree-clad bitch, who would bad mouth about the heroine to the hero’s mom. Sometimes she will poison the hero’s mind with a photograph of the heroine hugging another man. Rarely, she would let her pallu drop and reveal her biggies imprisoned tightly in her blouse, but she would never actually get down to engaging sexually with the hero. Denise, however, was more like the sultry, skinny dipping Bipasha Basu in
Jism
. Her sex quotient could weaken any guy’s defence and make him undo his pants. Anyway, I paused the Jay–Denise movie playing in my mind and assured Jay as well as myself that I trusted him. ‘It’s just that I have had a most bizarre first day at work,’ I explained.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked, with typical American courtesy.

Normally, I would have wanted Jay to express concern and ask
‘kya hua’
like an Indian boyfriend. I was not very fond of the formality Americans displayed even with their immediate family, but for now it suited me fine. There was no need for him to know about Deep yet. I had more important things on my mind. I informed him that I had told my parents about us.

‘Good! Now you can have your nude artwork back. It is sending out wrong signals to the neighbourhood boys,’ he chuckled.

I looked at his naked form and felt immense pleasure. It was a fine piece of art, but however much I wanted to, there was no way I could hang it in my bedroom without my mom going berserk.

‘Besides, it needs a rework,’ added Jay, showing off his guns.

I could tell from the increased size of his biceps that he was spending a lot more time at the gym.

‘Are you mad?’ I rebuffed in hushed tones. ‘This is no time for a joke.’

‘Why? Did your parents say no?’ he asked thoughtfully.

‘No. They never say no to me,’ I whined.

He gave me a confused look as if to question what I was fussing about.

‘Well, they didn’t say a yes either.’

‘Cool.’

‘Cool, meaning?’

‘Cool meaning cool as in fine, okay, no big deal,’ he said in an unaffected, poised manner, just like he had reacted to my lay-off news.

‘It is a big deal for me, Jay,’ I explained earnestly.

‘How does it matter what your parents think? It’s your life right?’

‘It does matter, Jay. To me their happiness matters.’

‘I thought only size mattered,’ he ribbed me.

There he was doing it again. Regarding this whole issue as a non-issue.

Seeing that I was not amused by his joke, he argued, ‘How do parents get to choose who fucks their daughter for the rest of her life?’

Well, I hadn’t seen arranged marriages in this light before and I must admit that I found it funny. I told him he had a valid point, but he would need a lot more than American humour in order to win my parents’ hearts.

‘At your service, ma’am,’ he replied dutifully, giving me a mock salute.

Consciously, I stopped myself from imagining the possible services he could offer and got down to work. I had prepared a comprehensive list of things he needed to learn in the next few months.

‘Do you know how to fly a kite?’ I began with the simple one first.

‘Used to be a kite-boarding expert back in high school,’ he boasted.

I quickly googled kite boarding and found that it is an adventure sport in which the rider harnesses kite power to propel himself across the water on a surfboard. Flying a multi-line steerable power kite is not quite the same as manually launching a diamond-shaped paper in the air and then keeping it there by constantly tugging on a glass-coated string.

‘Pa is more into Khaled Hosseini type kite flying,’ I said, discreetly.

‘Maybe I could get your dad excited about power kites instead,’ he suggested.

Why not? I thought to myself. Dad was open to learning new things and given Jay’s passion for sport, I felt confident that Jay and Dad would find a common ground somewhere.

‘Hope your old man is not into that game of balls where men keep coming in and going out for hours together,’ said Jay. ‘I prefer quicker action,’ he sniggered.

I knew what Jay meant by quicker action. It was interesting how everything acquired a sexual connotation when I was with Jay. Even cricket!

Cricket could get boring at times, though I quite liked the IPL T20 format, but Dad watched each minute of every match like he was some Zoya factor and the match’s outcome depended on his presence in front of the TV.

‘Tee hee hee …’ I giggled nervously. ‘Naah, Pa is not into bat–ball,’ I lied. ‘I mean, except when India plays against Pakistan.’ One step at a time, I told myself. We will deal with cricket later.

‘How about playing cards?’ I asked, moving on to the next item on my check list.

‘My favourite is blackjack. I once won a hundred bucks on a blackjack table in Vegas,’ he claimed. ‘I could teach you some gambling tricks.’

I thought he was being really sweet and supportive. ‘You need
to do a lot of card counting in blackjack. I am sure you would love bridge too.’ I crossed my fingers in hope.

‘Are you outta your mind?’ he remarked. ‘I was like four pegs down when I won that game. It was sheer luck.’

I guess I was pinning my hopes too high or maybe crossing my fingers too tightly. When it came to recreation, Jay had a distinct preference for physical activities as opposed to mental exercises. I mean, I could never even get him down to help me with those naughty crosswords that test your SQ (Sex Quotient). I somehow persuaded him to register on an online gaming site and look up bridge rules. We were doing okay so far, but I knew the next one was a hard nut to crack.

‘Remember, I told you about the music evenings my dad hosts at our home. It would be nice if you could sing a number or two,’ I spoke cautiously. Jay had made it clear to me, very early on, that he would not be enrolling for any Indian language courses.

‘You mean like lyrics … no way … you gotta be kidding,’ dismissed Jay. ‘I can barely say your name correctly after more than a year of dating. In any case, you know I prefer techno music, without words.’

I could never understand how someone can appreciate music without words. I mean words are everything to me. They added the meaning and soul to a song. A song without words was like a life without love, a flower without fragrance, a book without humour and a shampoo without froth.

‘It’s only a couple of songs,’ I insisted and argued that even a first grader can memorize school poems he doesn’t understand.

‘American schooling doesn’t focus on rote learning,’ he joshed, and then moving away from the topic, he asked, ‘Doesn’t your mom have any expectations from me?’

I wasn’t planning on going through my mom’s groom selection criteria, at least not yet, but just to see Jay’s reaction, I casually
mentioned that she wanted him to know the
Hanuman Chalisa
.

‘What the fuck is Hen-O-Men Char … Lisa?’ he asked, laughing out loud. ‘Oh wait! I think I know. CharLisa is a moniker for Charlie Sheen and his former girlfriend Lisa, right!’ Jay blabbered excitedly. ‘I fuckin love that sitcom
Two and a Half Men
.’

I gave him a blank stare.

‘Half-A-Men CharLisa? That’s cool! Did your mom coin that term?’ he inquired fervently, caught up in his own excitement. The only other things that got him so thrilled were sex toys and sports. ‘I think your mom and I will really hit it off,’ he concluded, with a self-satisfied grin.

Usually I found his Americanization of Indian words hilarious, but today I felt offended. Unknowingly he was mispronouncing and mocking a prayer. His reaction was expected. It was my reaction that I found surprising. It was not like I was very religious. I was, in fact, rather confused about my belief in God. It was one of the many things that I had put off for future contemplation. Yet, I failed to understand why I was feeling uncomfortable. ‘Hun—oo—maan Chaa—lee—saa,’ I broke it down phonetically on the chat window. ‘And it’s a prayer for one of our gods,’ I explained sombrely.

Jay closed his eyes regretfully for a moment and then sighed, ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’

We both looked uneasily at each other for a few seconds. After a brief, awkward silence, in which we both realized that something had gone amiss, he spoke, ‘You can’t fall in love with a guy and then change him. What if you find that you don’t love the changed person?’ His voice was soft and clear and his expression glum.

I waited for him to break into a smile like he always did after pulling my leg. Meanwhile, the iPod in my mind smartly selected the song tagged with keywords love, change, person. I heard the song
Ladki kyun na jaane kyun … tumhe badalne ko paas wo aati hai …
from
Hum Tum
playing in my back office.

‘Listen, Suhaani, I am Jay. Don’t try to make a Jayant out of me,’ he said, a cold tone creeping into his voice.

I had never seen him so humourless before and it made me fidgety. Clearly, I will never do well in Professor McGonagall’s class, for instead of Jay-ant, I had transformed him into Jay-no-joke.

‘I am sorry, Jay,’ I said anxiously. ‘It’s just that these things will help my parents relate to you.’ I said, justifying my failed attempt at the transfiguration charm.

‘All that I care for is whether you can relate to me or not.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Good, coz I am not a fuckin Shh-R-hook Can from
DDLJ
,’ he said, refusing point blank to make any effort to become a suitable boy.

He had been very supportive a while ago. At least I had thought that he was taking the whole kite and bridge stuff sportingly. Why had he suddenly gone berserk? Did he think I was playing a prank until he goofed up with CharLisa, when it finally dawned on him that I was being serious?

‘You got to at least try,’ I urged.

‘Why don’t you try turkey for Thanksgiving dinner first? I promise I will do whatever you want after that.’