May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (7 page)

First, the horoscopes of the prospective couple were exchanged. “They matched perfectly,” Rama told me. The parents exchanged further details on family background and education. Then photos were mailed. A few months later, Rama’s parents declared themselves pleased. Rama, who was twenty-two and had not had a date with anyone in the four years she’d lived in America, told them she’d marry the man. “I didn’t know him at all,” she said. She had not seen him since the meeting two years before, but she was certain that her parents knew best.

The wedding took place in 1973 in India. When I asked Rama if she had worried beforehand that she might not fall in love with the man, she gave me a puzzled look. “No,” she said. “I just thought, He is my husband, and I love him. He is going to be everything to me from now on.” Apparently he had been. After twelve years of “very happy” marriage, she said, “I still think he’s a better husband than anybody I could have asked for.”

I remember coming home stunned from interviews like this, mystified by what was going on in the minds of these women. They had seemed so much like me at first. What I did not understand at the time was the powerful sense of fatalism that Indian women have. Strict Hindus believe that their present lives have been predetermined by their karma, the accumulated sum of all good and bad actions from their previous lives. These beliefs are so central to the religion that they influence even the casual Hindu today. Women routinely told me that they had decided to marry a man half an hour after the first meeting because they felt it was “meant” to be. “It’s the biggest gamble of one’s life,” said Ritu Nanda, the thirty-seven-year-old director of one of India’s most successful home appliance companies. “So why not just leave it to destiny?” A traditional woman believes that she was married to her husband in her previous life and will remain married to him in the next. The women I interviewed were too sophisticated to endorse that view, but nobody dismissed it as nonsense, either.

This brings me to Meena, whose name I have changed for reasons that will be obvious. She, too, felt that her marriage was predetermined—but I’m getting ahead of the story. I first met her one summer, at the home of a friend. She was twenty-five, pretty and stylish, proud of being a “modern” girl who worked in her father’s laboratory supply business. She was from a middle-class family, was ambitious and assertive, and spoke rapid, idiomatic English. She and her parents had been engaged in an active search to find her a husband. “My parents are
going about it in a very scientific way,” she said. That meant they were checking the matrimonial ads and alerting relatives and mutual friends to be on the lookout for prospects. “I have already been shown several boys,” she told me. (In arranged marriage parlance, men and women are “boys” and “girls.” During the introductory family get-togethers, boys and girls are not said to meet but rather are “shown” to each other. This is in fact the most accurate term for the excruciating event.)

None of the boys had been up to Meena’s standards, and she had rejected them all. “One of them didn’t even have the guts to finish his own pastry,” she said. “He had to ask his mother first. So I said, ‘Good-bye.’ ” She had asked the boys who were businessmen detailed questions about their accounts, because “being in business myself, I want to know.” She seemed to be in the market for a chief executive officer rather than a husband. I didn’t have much hope that she’d find either one.

I was wrong. Seven months later, I got an invitation to her wedding. She had found herself a young doctor, her sister-in-law’s brother-in-law, a plump twenty-eight-year-old with a soft, sweet face. She had first met him at her house, where both sets of parents made awkward conversation over tea. Then she and the boy went to her room alone for twenty-five minutes. She found him “very nice to talk to” and was “indifferent” to his looks; he was a big improvement over her previous prospects. “There were one or two cases where the guys physically repulsed me,” she said. That evening his parents called and said the boy wanted to see her again, so the two met alone for coffee the next day. After that there was a month of silence. Then one day the boy’s mother called Meena’s mother, and the two women got down to business. The boy’s mother wanted to know if Meena had become engaged to anyone else, and when Meena’s mother said no, the boy’s mother said the family would like to ask for Meena’s hand. Meena’s mother said she would check to see if her daughter was still interested and call back.

Meena thought about it for a moment, then said yes. “I was very indifferent, frankly,” she explained to me later. “I used to always judge any proposal that came my way on the specific merits.” Since the boy had good credentials and she had no major objections to him, she instinctively felt that the marriage would be right. She knew his family was more conservative than hers, but she did not expect that to be a problem. “I was very fatalistic,” she said.

The two went on three dates before the wedding—once, shopping, followed by lunch at Pizza King; another time to a movie; and then
to an expensive dinner at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Afterward they sat in the lobby and watched the foreign tourists go by. It was all very glamorous. Meena had been spending her days shopping for saris and linens, helping with the guest list, and discussing the new Maruti car her parents were going to give her as a wedding present as the major part of the dowry her parents had promised her in-laws during the prewedding negotiations. Fortunately, Meena was discovering that she liked the boy “tremendously.” The idea of a husband thrilled her. “I was excited about having a man around, living with him, and having all the frills and fancies,” she said.

Her wedding started “on time,” a mere two hours behind schedule. I arrived only a half hour late, thinking this would be socially correct, and found myself alone with the caterer. This gave me a chance to look around. The wedding was to be held in a large grassy area, open to the sky but enclosed on four sides by circus-style canvas fencing. Inside, rows of metal chairs sat facing a center platform with two red plush-covered thrones for the bride and groom. Waiters were still setting up a buffet of heavy chicken and lamb curries in a tent lit by fluorescent lights. Skinny men were hanging strands of marigolds from the canopy under which the religious ceremony would take place. It all had the feel of a small-town fair. As I watched the preparations, the hot afternoon gave way to a pretty orange sky and then a cool March evening. The grass smelled fresh, and Delhi’s traffic rumbled in the background.

Meena finally arrived, looking predictably dazed, and was immediately ushered to a room in a little building near the wedding enclosure. The women of the family surrounded her, offering bits of advice. Her wedding dress was a heavy silk in hot pink, and her nose ring, similar in style to an enormous jeweled hoop earring, hung from one nostril all the way down to her lips. This made talking difficult, although she giggled a lot. I gave her a bouquet of sweet peas and wished her good luck.

At last the groom pulled up on his white horse and things got under way, in a manner of speaking. There is a certain aimlessness to Indian weddings that is confusing at first. Most of the guests ignored the religious ceremony, talking among themselves and wandering around while children chased each other through the grass. A rigid row of aunts had already positioned themselves near the food. None of this was considered impolite. Wedding ceremonies usually drag on for hours and only immediate relatives are expected to endure watching
them without interruption. But I loved much of what I saw. As a priest chanted Sanskrit prayers, Meena and the groom sat under the canopy in front of the sacred fire for several hours, the glow from the flames reflected in their faces. Toward the end, after Meena’s father had slipped the priest some rupees to hurry things up, as fathers of Indian brides often do, Meena and the groom rose to circle the fire, the groom leading Meena slowly in a clockwise direction. The couple took seven steps, each one representing a blessing: food, strength, wealth, happiness, progeny, cattle and devotion. After the seventh step, the marriage was irrevocable. The priest sprinkled holy water on the couple, and soon they took their seats on the two thrones as the flashes from the guests’ cameras exploded in their faces. Meena said afterward that her mind was a blank.

When it was all over around midnight, she said good-bye to her family and, like most Indian brides, broke down in tears. I had long since left, but I had seen these melodramas before. They are the crucial hysterical conclusion to any Indian wedding. From that night on, the bride is no longer considered a daughter in her parents’ home. Instead she will move in with her husband and in-laws and begin a new life among a household of strangers. Indian brides handle these partings with great theatrics, often wailing uncontrollably, which I eventually decided was the only rational response, given what was in store for many of them. The bride’s mother and sisters wail along with her, and so does her father, as she is slowly pushed through the crowd and into the car that will take her away. The first time I saw this I didn’t even know the family, but I found it so wrenching that I cried too.

Meena spent her wedding night tossing nervously in a bedroom with her mother-in-law and several other women she did not know. In conservative Indian families, this is traditional; the new husband and the men sleep elsewhere. It was not until the next night that Meena was allowed to sleep with her husband, and then was relieved when he didn’t want to make love. “That was rather nice of him,” she said. “Normally, a boy just pounces on the girl.” Both she and her husband were virgins. The marriage was finally consummated the following night, an experience Meena described to me as quick and physically “very painful.” Neither husband nor wife talked much about what was occurring between them, although the next morning Meena noticed that her husband seemed glad that “he had got through it—no disaster had happened.”

At first I heard from friends that Meena was ecstatic about her new
life. Then I began hearing that she was fighting with her mother-in-law. That seemed routine, so I didn’t give it much thought. But then, not quite a year later, I was told she had moved back with her parents and that the marriage was over. I was surprised—not by a marriage that had turned out badly, but by Meena’s return home. Ten years ago that would have been impossible for her; her parents could not have endured the scandal and she would have had to stick with a miserable marriage for the rest of her life. So I guess this was change. I went to see Meena a few days after her first wedding anniversary, on a depressing, already hot March afternoon. I sat with her for two hours, in a darkened upstairs flat with a view through the chick blinds of children playing in the dust of a dried-out park. She was thinner and looked badly shaken, and she cried as she told me she would probably get a divorce. It was awful for her. No matter what all the Indian magazines said about the increasing divorce rate among the middle class, the truth was that for women it was still considered shameful. Meena would have trouble marrying again. Her husband would not.

At first the marriage had been “okay,” Meena said. At her in-laws’ request, she had given up her job and was helping around the house, cleaning and cooking, primarily. She claimed she had no trouble filling her days, even though she could no longer go out and see friends as freely as before. “When you have time on your hands,” she said, “you make things in the kitchen that don’t need to be made, or eat things you don’t need to eat.” But she was eager to be a good Indian wife and so was willing to compromise. That especially applied to sex, which had not improved since the first night. Her husband was often impotent, and on the nights when he wasn’t she found she still didn’t enjoy “the act itself.” Her mother-in-law, meanwhile, had been keeping a close watch on the time the newlyweds spent in their room alone.

After the first month, Meena felt her husband was withdrawing from her. Then he stopped talking to her altogether. Two silent months later he finally admitted that he had made a mistake and that his mother had pressured him to marry her. He no longer came to their room, sleeping on the terrace instead. “It was horrible,” Meena said. “I was shattered.” She decided that he must have “homosexual tendencies” or other “physical problems.” Her mother-in-law, she believed, was “filling his ears with lies” about her. Another problem was the Maruti; the car delivery had been held up by the company, yet Meena’s mother-in-law was demanding to know where it was. By midsummer Meena had moved back with her parents—“I would have committed
suicide if I hadn’t come home”—and was taking daily tranquilizers and sleeping pills prescribed by a psychiatrist. She had seen the doctor only once because he would not treat her unless she and her husband came in as a couple. Then, that fall, her mother-in-law suddenly called to ask her back. By this time, Meena had found a good job in advertising, and her parents, more concerned about their daughter’s happiness than what the neighbors might say, told her not to go. But off she went, determined to give it one last try. The reconciliation lasted a week, and after a fight with her in-laws, Meena was back home.

Who knows what the other side of the story was. I didn’t have it in me to track down Meena’s husband and present him with her charges just as the family was beginning divorce proceedings. Maybe Meena was impossible to live with. Maybe she had been too “modern” and aggressive and had made her husband feel inadequate in bed. I guessed he had been telling the truth when he said he had been pressured into marrying her. He probably was not so awful, although I suspected her mother-in-law was. The point is that Meena’s experience, from the bride’s point of view, was not at all unusual. Certainly her sexual problems were not.

In theory, during the first phase of an arranged marriage, a bride has tremendous seductive power over her husband. The first few years are meant to be spent in sexual passion, but when things cool off, as expected, then parents believe it is fortunate that they had the foresight to match up two compatible people who can settle down to the everyday business of life. “Love is fine,” Usha Seth, a forty-one-year-old New Delhi housewife, told me. “But after the first few years, that’s when you realize how important it is that a person is considerate and kind.” Parents are also aware of the all-consuming lust that can rage between a young man and woman who have never had sex before. This is sometimes cited as one reason that the bride spends time away from her husband during the first year of marriage, usually in long visits to her family. Mahatma Gandhi says in his autobiography that it was this custom that helped keep him from drowning in sexual obsession during the first year of his arranged marriage, when he and his wife were thirteen. Every few months, his bride’s parents would summon her home. “Such calls were very unwelcome in those days,” Gandhi wrote, “but they saved us both.” (The Gandhi biographer and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, however, sees something more significant in Gandhi’s admission of adolescent lust. “How ‘passionate’ such a boy or man really is becomes a moot question, for we can only know of
the quantitative threat which he feels the need of confessing,” Erikson writes. “But one thing is devastatingly certain: nowhere is there any suggestion of joyful intimacy.” Erikson argues that Gandhi in fact harbored “some vindictiveness, especially toward woman as the temptress,” which in his later years made him attempt, at first with mixed success, a life of celibacy.)