by Shreya Ramachandran
[box]Shreya Ramachandran discusses the tradition of arranged marriages in India through a story. Meet Anshika, a young and vibrant woman, who finds it very difficult to make up her mind about a prospective alliance found by her mother. And while Shreya takes us through her troubled mind, we also learn yet another truth – is love ever really lost in the fabric of dynamic relationships?[/box]It was almost eleven in the morning when Anshika finally turned up at the restaurant, with her hair falling onto her face and her fingers black with grease. Her foot was stained with blood, and her kajal had smudged onto her cheeks. She could feel damp patches of sweat on her kurta. Her brother Aniket had left ten missed calls on her cell phone, and she had ignored them all.
“Anshika.” Vinay’s eyes widened when he looked her disheveled self. “What happened?”
“Nothing. The thing is, my scooter fell over. I had to come on my scooter, well actually it’s Aniket’s scooter, and it kind of almost fell down onto me, but it’s okay. Nothing really happened. The auto-walas went crazy, kept saying they’d take me anywhere for free. It was disgusting, and the main thing was that the scooter was scratch-free. Thank God the scooter is fine, because Aniket would have literally shrieked like a two-year-old if something happened to the scooter. It’s a family heirloom. Dad left it for us. Apparently it has sentimental value.”
“Anshika… Are you okay? I know that your father–”
“I’m okay. Forget my father.”
The waiter placed down their order of paratha and bread omelette. They looked down automatically at their food, served neatly on steel plates with identical cups of ketchup.
“Anshika, when your mother fixed this marriage… You were okay with it, weren’t you?” Vinay asked.
“Look, my mother does many things. I didn’t know if I wanted to get married. I still don’t know.”
She paused to take a huge bite of bread omelette. “Listen Vinay, the past two months we’ve known each other, it’s been great fun spending time with you. I look forward to our little lunch dates. But the thing is, do you want to marry me? Marriage is different from eating bread omelettes with a girl at Shahi Family Restaurant outside the house your family has lived in since the Quit India times. You knew what your job title was before you were old enough to know the family business. Marriage to someone with a profile like mine was the logical next step. Is that why you want to marry me?”
“Anshika, ever since the day I first met you, I knew I wanted to marry you. Both our mothers were talking about our kundlis matching…”
She started laughing again, and slapped him on the shoulder. “God, is this happening? You’re talking about our horoscopes matching? What next, you’re going to say you’ll only marry me if my father buys you two cars and one farmhouse in Chattarpur?”
“After sixty three days of knowing you, I am sure I want to marry you.”
“That’s not the point, Vinay. The point is, should we get married? I can’t just get married! Just… I don’t know.” She got out of the booth. “Chal, let’s get out of here. It’s so stifling. I can’t think.”
***
Anshika made it back home in a record 10 minutes and dismounted before the engine was turned off. She ran to the back of the house, where Aniket and their mother were sitting at the old wooden table in the garden, cutting capsicums and potatoes.
“Anshika. Where have you been? I called you at least 20 times.” Aniket’s voice was low and urgent. He tilted his head towards their mother. “Ma’s upset. You’ve taken two months to decide about Vinay.”
“I knew what you were going to say. And no, I can’t marry him. Why are you upset, Ma? Aniket, your scooter fell. I’m sorry! Nothing happened to it, thank God. I was really worried… for a minute…. Why are you both looking at me like that?”
“Anshika, sit down.” Their mother didn’t even look up from the knife and cutting board.
She sat down.
“When I went to speak to Vinay’s mother, you know how difficult it was? We haven’t spoken to Vinay’s family since your father left us”, her mother said, and her voice wavered and broke and she started crying.
“Oh God Ma. At least put down the knife before crying. You’re scaring me.”
“Our respect was completely lost ever since that happened.”
“Ma. Dad left YOU. If anything, his respect should be lost, not YOURS. What the hell is this?”
“Anshika, let Ma finish”, Aniket said, trying to keep things peaceful, but Anshika had already stood up.
“She doesn’t need to finish, Aniket. I know what she’ll say. She’ll say I need to marry Vinay, otherwise our RESPECT WILL BE LOST.”
“Anshika, calm down…”
“You know what, I am just sick of this family. I am completely sick of this. Dad leaves us with nothing except a broken scooter and a half-depleted bank account, and you don’t even care.”
“Don’t talk about your father that way”, her mother said, cutting a potato into small dices.
Aniket fiddled with his collar sleeve.
“Aniket, seriously, say something. This is ridiculous. She’s defending Dad.”
Before Aniket could speak, Anshika said, “I’m just sick of this family.”
She picked up the knife from Aniket’s cutting board and jabbed it straight through the heart of a particularly fat capsicum.
***
Metro Park should not have existed, and yet it did. It should long ago have been taken over by yet another manic construction project; the grass should have morphed into yellow, sparse shrubs crowded by a forest of rotting trash. But the park stayed untouched as the city’s only green lungs. Children with a new Chor Police game strategy dying to be tested; engineers wrung by writing code at Tech Park; evening walkers determined that today would be that one magical day when the two kilos disappear for good; all these people slowly filtered into the park as the evening thickened. The Shantinagar Metro line stretched in the distance, with hulky trains shuttling like mad elephants across its parallel tracks.
“You haven’t called the past two days,” Vinay said to Anshika. “Is something wrong?”
Another Metro train passed by in the distance, filled with people she would never meet. Maybe she would finally tell Vinay. Life wouldn’t stop. Another
train would pass by exactly four minutes later.
She scratched her knee and sat up. “When I was eighteen years old, I couldn’t decide whether to do a BA in English or Journalism. Sometime around then, Dad announced his hidden but everlasting love for a very nice Bengali woman named Harini. A Journalism professor.” Anshika’s smile was a half-stitch. “Safe to say, I picked BA English after that.”
Vinay nodded. “Continue….”
“I don’t know…. He moved out, but didn’t even take his clothes from the cupboard or the things in his desk. They’re still there, and I keep telling Ma we should throw them out, but she never listens. Dad didn’t even move to a new city. I run into Harini almost every week in Shantinagar. Aniket and Ma are still obsessed with Dad. They polish his desk with Colin every day. And the worst part is seeing the wedding album – the horrible black and white photos of Ma and Dad.”
A new ice-cream wala hopefully trundled into the commercial hotspot of Metro Park.
Vinay cleared his throat softly. “Anshika, 20 years from now, you’ll tell our children – one boy named Sidharth and one girl named Sahaana – about the times you weren’t sure whether an arranged marriage would work. The next time you bump into Harini or your mother is sitting and waiting for your father to ring the doorbell, you can say that your life isn’t stuck like a broken old watch, insisting it’s two o’clock even when you know it’s ten. You’ll have new wedding photos to look at, and I promise they won’t be black and white.”
Anshika didn’t say anything. She turned away to watch two children playing with half-unstrung badminton rackets and a very battle-weary shuttlecock, but her attention was somewhere else.
“That was a very impressive speech, boss”, she said, when she turned back towards him.
Vinay smiled. “Thank you.”
“Now let’s go home, Aniket will go mad otherwise. As it is, I’m not picking up his calls.”
“Why not?”
“He’ll just ask me if I’ve decided about marrying you.”
“Okay…. What will you tell him?”
“Well… Let’s see.”
They stood up and dusted the wet grass off themselves. She picked up her bag and he shook a small white insect off his arm. They walked out of Metro Park without seeing that three more trains passed by or that yet another ice-cream wala had come and gone.
Shreya Ramachandran is a seventeen-year-old girl from Chennai who attempts to write about the world – or what she knows of it, always obsessed with saying things in her own strange simple way.
Pic: birds – haml3t- http://www.flickr.com/photos/haml3t/
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