Sideways on a Scooter (19 page)

Afterward, Azmat sidled up to me.

“More
chai
?” she shouted above the music.

I nodded, and she sweetly poured half of her cup into mine. We leaned against Leslie’s desk. Azmat was wearing her most prized workout T-shirt, a gift from one of the other ladies. “Only One Angel” it said, in pink cursive letters. Her English was as bad as my Hindi, but she must have been practicing, because she managed to ask, “Have you done your marriage yet?”

It was a direct translation from Hindi, in which you say that a marriage “has happened” or “is over,” which seems appropriate since it is, after all, a foregone conclusion in India.

“Um, yes,” I said uncomfortably. “My husband is in New York now.”

I switched to Hindi and to Azmat’s own marriage plans. Her older brother, Mehboob, was overwhelmed by the responsibility their parents had left him with—of finding matches for her and her two sisters and funding three weddings. Even though siblings are supposed to be married off in chronological order, he’d decided to look for husbands for Azmat and her twenty-four-year-old sister, Rhemet, simultaneously, to minimize time and cost. If it depressed Azmat to be half cheated out of the most important event in an Indian woman’s life, she didn’t show it.

“This is the simplest way. And he’ll easily find a match for Rhemet. Even though she’s two years older than me, she’s slim, and she makes the best
biryani
in the neighborhood. Her only problem is the mole on her face. Still, I don’t think it will be long before we’re both married.”

The more Azmat talked, the less I believed that. I was hardly an expert in arranged marriage, but the odds didn’t seem to be in her favor. She and her sister were uneducated, they had next to no dowry to offer, and they wouldn’t marry anyone who didn’t meet their religious and caste criteria. Azmat informed me that as a member of the rarefied Syed caste—“the top rank of Muslims”—she would never consider marrying a boy from the butcher or barber caste; such boys fought constantly inside their families, she told me with authority.

For centuries, marriage brokers took care of such concerns, pairing off couples based on their caste and horoscope. Each community in India had its own version of the matchmaker: In some villages, it was the barber’s wife, in others, the Hindu priest, or
pujari
. Then, a couple of decades ago, the classified pages of the Sunday newspapers broke the matchmaker’s monopoly, widening the pool of potential partners. With access to the classifieds, families could choose from hundreds of listings for girls and boys from across the country. In theory they could pick a match from a different religion or caste, but they rarely did.

Mehboob had first put the word out in his mosque and then around the rest of the neighborhood. When no boys appeared, he tried to hire a local matchmaker, a Muslim woman who had a reputation for making quick, caste-specific alliances via cell-phone calls to the families. She demanded more than a hundred dollars per girl, though, and wouldn’t give a discount for sisters—which Azmat thought was terribly cheap of her. Mehboob seemed at a loss.

I came into the gym one morning to find Azmat holding court. Her face was flushed with excitement. She’d stumbled on a juicy piece of neighborhood gossip, and she’d clearly been milking it for all it was worth. It was an update on a story we all knew: A Muslim boy had eloped with a Hindu girl the previous year, and it had been the talk of the neighborhood. The girl’s family had promptly disowned her, and the couple had disappeared from Nizamuddin. Now Azmat had found out that the girl had resurfaced, eight months pregnant. The gym ladies were all abuzz. The boy’s family had agreed to take the couple in, but the girl’s family continued to refuse to acknowledge the marriage. This
was only natural, according to the gym ladies, who spoke up from their various exercise-machine perches.

“The girl must have got herself pregnant to try to get sympathy from her family.”

“It’s much harder for the girl’s family to accept such a match, because she’s the one who converts to his religion. A Hindu girl raising her child a Muslim—no one wants that in their family,” another said.

Azmat nodded knowledgeably from her cross-legged position on the gym floor.

“It’s very difficult for the girl’s side. If I ran off with a Hindu boy, my family would have to leave our mosque. The boy’s family gets a new wife and child, but the girl’s family gets nothing from an interreligious match—nothing but shame.”

CHAPTER 7
A Million Matches

T
he home page of
Shaadi.com
exhorts the unmarried to have faith: “20 million miracles and counting: Register free.” Shaadi, named after the Hindi word for “marriage,” styles itself as an online wedding clearinghouse: Members can search among 450 castes, sixty-seven regional languages, and every possible Indian religion for a match. It provides much the same service as the village barber’s wife—aligning couples based on community and background—just online.

Despite India’s renown—or notoriety—as the world’s IT helpdesk, only about a third of Indians have Internet access. The percentage is growing exponentially every year, though, and more than a hundred websites have popped up to cater to the Indian matrimonial market. Although Azmat liked to drop the English word
computer
into her sentences—she pronounced it robotically, in three distinct syllables, “com-
pooh
-ter”—neither she nor her sisters had ever used one. The relatively savvy Mehboob spoke English and had learned to type in college, but he didn’t own a PC. So when a friend convinced him to fill out
the online form seeking husbands for his sisters, he did so from an Internet café.

Even while matrimonial sites such as Shaadi retain the most traditional aspects of Indian marriage, they are revolutionizing the institution. They are the portal for the new generation of arranged alliances, striking a compromise between love matches and pure arranged marriages. Ungracefully called “love-cum-arranged marriages” in Indian English, these are Indian marriages with Western influences, like Pakistani-style democracy or capitalism with Chinese characteristics. Theoretically, at least, the couple can have as much input into the process as their parents do. Traditionally, the boy’s parents would send an inquiry to the girl’s parents, but now the boy can now do it himself by clicking the “express interest” button on Shaadi—the less playful equivalent of a sending a “wink” or a “poke” on
Match.com
or Facebook. Like many American dating sites, Shaadi also features its own instant messaging feature, a socially acceptable form of direct, live communication. It’s virtuous virtual dating.

In
Kal Ho Naa Ho
(Tomorrow May Never Come), which is best abbreviated to
KHNH
, Shah Rukh Khan shows us that this, the compromise method, is the way to be modern. Until recently, the only acceptable expression of love in Bollywood was karmic, family-approved marriage—but in this film, the heroine meets SRK’s character without family intervention and falls for him on her own. Standing in front of an elaborate Hindu shrine, her grandmother chastises her. “There is no such thing as love. If there is marriage, it is always arranged!” she says, and in the film’s progressive eye, she becomes a caricature of the old, slightly embarrassing India.

Later in the film, the heroine describes the sensation of love to a girlfriend.

“Before, I used to get annoyed with all the little things he did … and now I love those same things!”

“This is what love is! Oh my God, I’m so excited!” her girlfriend shrieks.

Geeta had said unequivocally that she’d never again “spend time
with any boy without a proposal.” Being burned by Mohan made her feel she should seek the safety net of a marriage with parental sanction, but she was also struggling with the idea of spending her life with someone her mother selected for her. I thought Shaadi seemed like a promising alternative to her mother’s endless stream of chaperoned arranged marriage meetings, and the day Azmat told me about it, I went straight from the gym to Nanima’s apartment.

Her maid let me in, and I tiptoed past the old woman sleeping on the sofa. Geeta was on the floor of her bedroom amid stacks of clothes, looking overwhelmed as she tried to clean out her overstuffed closet. I leaned into the doorway and asked, rather breathlessly, whether she’d heard about the site.

Geeta eyed me suspiciously over the piles of clothes. I felt suddenly silly for rushing over before I’d even changed out of my gym clothes.

“Of course I have. I already have a profile up on the site.” She returned to her folding, but I came in and sat down on her bed anyway. After a moment of trying to ignore me, she sighed and spoke up again. “My dad thinks Shaadi is great. But that’s because he likes anything to do with technology. You know how we were the first family in our neighborhood to have a vacuum cleaner or a TV? It’s the same with this. He thinks that because it is modern and up to date, I’m going to find my husband this way. But I’m not so sure.”

“It seems like if you do it online, you get a lot more freedom and control of the whole process, right?”

Geeta shifted impatiently. “Maybe, but you know what? I’m not sure having more freedom is a good idea. It might work on American dating sites, but I’ve had some bad experiences. Some boys on Shaadi confuse the arranged marriage thing with dating. They act like we’re in America, just dating on and on, with no wedding in sight.”

She looked down at the unfolded clothes scattered across the floor. Geeta had seemed sad in recent weeks. She’d told me her mother had been calling a lot, nagging her to choose a match. I told her we could talk about it another time, and walked home through the dusk. It wasn’t easy to be a friend to Geeta these days. I don’t think she put much stock in my advice because she didn’t take my own relationship
issues seriously. She thought I had it easy, and she was right, in a way: As muddled as my Benjamin situation was, at least it didn’t involve our families, and neither of us was being pressured into marriage. My mother would occasionally make wistful comments about how happy children would make me and that kind of thing, but if she didn’t consider Benjamin husband material, she didn’t say so. I took it for granted that my parents would accept whomever I chose to marry, and that if I decided not to get married at all, they would accept that, too. In India, though, it is not just the parents’ right to marry off their children—it’s their duty.

Geeta called a few days later to ask if she could stop by. She sounded a little sheepish.

“I promised my father I would look at some Shaadi profiles this evening. He has sent me all their bio-data,” she said, using the Indian English word for résumés used in personal ads. She paused. “Would you mind going through them with me?”

I wanted to encourage her efforts, but my “Of course!” probably sounded a little too perky. I wondered briefly whether I was trying to live vicariously through her dating life, a possibility that seemed especially pathetic, since Geeta’s dating life consisted of reviewing the résumés of boys her father had chosen for her. My enthusiasm was not, in any case, contagious. I could tell that Geeta was trying to look cheery when I let her in, but when I pulled up a chair to my desk for her, she slumped into it as though she dreaded the task ahead.

“I try to tell my parents that the emphasis should be on getting married to the right boy. Not just anybody. But my mother doesn’t hear it—she just keeps telling me my time is running out.” She pushed her hair back from her face and sat up straight, as though to resolve herself to tackle the task ahead. “She’s probably right. I need to get serious. I have decided I should start spending at least a couple hours a week looking for a boy.”

She pulled up a browser window on my laptop.

The photo on her profile page showed a younger and happier Geeta than the one I knew. She grimaced, as though she already regretted sharing this intimate view of herself with me.

“That picture was taken some time back. My mother says I need to keep it up to counteract my age, since they make you list it. Even one year over thirty puts me out of range for marriage, according to the way most Indians think.”