Sideways on a Scooter (20 page)

“Do your parents go into your Shaadi profile?” I asked.

“Actually, my parents pretty much created it. They said it would help me look more serious about marriage if they took charge of it.”

She scrolled through, and I realized how little the site shared with American dating sites. Profiles on Shaadi are formal, not flirty; the focus is on practicality rather than individuality and romance. Most of the information seems boilerplate, intended to put families at ease. There are no questions about the worst lie you’ve ever told or your favorite on-screen sex scene.

At Shaadi, they told me that their member surveys show that new priorities, such as “compatibility and geographic proximity,” are consistently outweighed by age-old Indian marital concerns, such as caste and astrology. Few Hindus will agree to a marriage unless a
pujari
or astrologer verifies that the couple’s birth charts are aligned. At Shaadi, they streamline the process with a function called “AstroSoulMate Search,” which allows members to search the database using over forty criteria from their horoscopes.

For women in search of a husband, the most important categories are education, profession, and height. According to Shaadi’s research, the biggest priorities for men in search of a wife are “innocence and fairness.” It took me a moment to realize that “fairness” referred to India’s centuries-old preference for light skin, and “innocence” to virginity, which is a particularly difficult trait to measure. Even in India, matrimonial sites can hardly ask female members to provide a list of boyfriends and activities performed together.

But Geeta told me that families have their own ways to figure it out: The parents of a potential groom will often ask about “a girl’s past” and
“whether she has had experiences.” These phrases, so opaque to me, could not be clearer to marriage-age Indian girls such as Geeta. The line of questioning is harsher if a girl has lived alone, she said, because that increases the chance she’s been boyfriended.

It’s rather easier for a girl to offer positive evidence of her fairness than of her chastity. Shaadi members are given half a dozen word choices to help them get specific about their skin type in their profile, ranging from
very fair
to
wheatish
to
dark
. I found it hard to imagine any family actually choosing the last term to describe their daughter or son. Darker skin is associated with lower status in India, partly because the poorest are exposed to the sun as they toil as manual laborers. A pallid hue, on the other hand, evokes the more comfortable lifestyle of the higher castes.

Today, India has a multimillion-dollar fairness industry. The leading brand of skin-lightening cream, Fair & Lovely, is so popular that it now manufactures a “Menz Active” version. In the ads, a fair-skinned hero revs his motorcycle, in an effort to prove that it is possible to be manly while investing in a product to smooth your skin tone.

In a Fair & Lovely ad aimed at women, a father sits in his modest village shack, brooding over how unlucky he is to have a daughter because he’ll have to save money for her dowry. The dark-skinned daughter cowers in an ill-lit corner of the hut. In the next frame, she discovers Fair & Lovely cream, and she’s shown accepting an office job, clad in a Western business suit, her skin washed out from its original brown. The glamorous globalized lifestyle calls to India’s village girls, the ad tells us, but it’s open only to those who meet the traditional vision of Indian beauty.

Geeta clicked disconsolately through her profile.

“It seems like this should be a good method, but you’d be amazed at how many guys on Shaadi are confused about what they want. I have a theory of why. India is in a transition phase now. It’s difficult for modern boys to know whether they want a love type or an arranged type. I
keep meeting boys who think that if I am willing to chat online, I’ll be willing to date them, too.”

“Even on this site? It seems pretty obvious that the whole point is marriage.”

Geeta flopped back in the chair. A couple of years ago, she said, she’d started instant messaging with one boy, Aditya, who’d expressed interest by planting a Shaadi smiley-face emoticon beside her name. He was a Punjabi Brahmin with a professional career, over thirty, and never married—but even though he fulfilled all her criteria, Geeta didn’t tell her father about him, because she’d agreed to meet him alone, in person.

The first arranged marriage meeting is supposed to be escorted. In some communities, being seen alone with a boy can destroy a girl’s reputation. Geeta was trying to loosen up and play it cool, though. She agreed to meet Aditya in a Barista coffee shop, an Indian-owned chain that helped spread what the Indian media like to call the “urban coffee craze” to the land of
chai
. Barista coffee shops feature Starbucks-style merchandise, sayings about coffee on the walls, comfortable chairs, and a variety of blended coffee drinks, none of which Geeta would drink.

Aditya bought her a smoothie and sat opposite her on a high stool. Their conversation skipped between the appropriate topics for an arranged marriage date—families, plans for the future. Geeta was well accustomed to the protocol of such meetings. In the absence of the boy’s parents, who usually take the lead, she let Aditya ask the questions and revealed little. Coyness is essential to the initial presentation.

Eventually Aditya turned to the meat of the matter.

“What about your past—any prior relationship?”

Against her better instincts, Geeta lowered her eyes and acknowledged that she’d had “a friend” in college and afterward.

“I already knew I didn’t like him enough to marry him, so I didn’t care that much, but I still don’t know why I said it. There’s nothing to be gained from admitting such things to a boy.”

Things got awkward then. Aditya wanted to stay for another coffee, but Geeta told him she had to go—it was already getting dark outside. As he walked her through the parking lot to her car, he tried to take her hand.

“I already have strong feelings for you, Geeta. You are so pretty. Please, can I hold your hand?”

Absolutely not, was the outraged response. Geeta tugged her hand away and leaped into her car, terrified both about what could happen and about what the people in the parking lot might think had happened. Aditya stood there as she pulled out, text messaging her not to leave. Tears sparked to her eyes even now, as she recalled it.

“This is what I get for telling him I had a friend before. Immediately he thought I am the kind of girl who he can just take advantage of. As though this automatically makes me the kind of girl who has boyfriends, and who will just keep meeting him—maybe five times, maybe ten times—who knows how long it would go on like that, getting nowhere toward marriage.”

To me, the incident sounded more like a routine high school fumble than the kind of thing that would bring a thirty-something woman to tears. But I reminded myself that I had to apply a different standard to Geeta. She couldn’t help but think that by meeting Aditya alone, she’d been asking for it. That, combined with the mention of another man in her past, had sent a message that she was a boyfriended girl, she thought; or, at the very least, that she was looking for something other than a traditional marriage.

Sobered by the memory, Geeta returned to her profile.

“I need a boy who seems serious about marriage. It’s hard to tell, though. How do I know whether he’ll be the kind who wants to grab my hand? The only way is to have an escort and limit the meetings.”

When I asked how many meetings she thought appropriate, she had the answer at the ready.

“I can tell in half an hour whether I want to marry a guy or not.”

This seemed ill-advised, since Geeta hoped to establish an emotional connection with her prospective husband. I wondered how she rendered such a quick judgment, and how often it was right. My own
first impressions of men were consistently off the mark: overenthusiastic at first, followed by precipitous disappointment. Apparently it was not so with Geeta.

“By the time I meet a boy, I’ve already seen his photo. I already know his family background and his job. The only thing left is to see whether there is some attraction and whether he is pleasant and down to earth. How much time can it take?”

She clicked on her name to see how many Shaadi members had expressed interest in her in recent weeks. There were just two emoticons beside her name, from the profile names “Rohit2555” and “InnocentinLove.” Geeta sank a little lower in her chair, as though imagining that “InnocentinLove” would not consider her innocent enough.

“I don’t think I can do this,” she said abruptly, her hands on her thighs as she pushed the chair back from my desk. “There’s a reason why pure arranged marriage worked for so many years. Girls shouldn’t have to do it by themselves. I’m going home to watch TV with Nanima.”

My friend Kalpana, a newspaper columnist in Mumbai, told me once about a speech she had given to a group of students at a women’s college. She’d been asked to talk to them about the ways women’s lives were changing in India and instead found herself talking about all the things that have stayed the same. Kalpana asked the students to name the biggest issue in their lives; they all said marriage. Then she asked for a show of hands from those who would be responsible for deciding who they would marry, and none of the women stirred. When she asked how many wanted to be able to make that decision, all the hands flew into the air. The experience stuck with her.

“It’s a terribly frustrating time for young women,” she said. “They’re allowed to make all kinds of choices that previous generations of women couldn’t make in India—what they will study, where they will work, where they will live. And yet, when it comes to the most important decision of their lives, their parents don’t trust them with it. It’s like they’re only partly allowed to enter the real world.”

Geeta’s parents taught her that the Hindu marriage is decided by fate and sanctioned by God, but her friends spoke about a very different idea of marriage, one born of love and ended when it is no longer satisfying. They were moving in their own circles in colleges and offices, where they were falling into relationships that had nothing to do with the family. Many women of Geeta’s generation wanted to abandon the traditional extended Indian family, with its expectation of sharing and conformity, and live separately, instead, in nuclear families. It seemed that upward mobility and fewer children might eventually drive the multigenerational family out of fashion in India, which is exactly what happened to it in the United States and Europe.

English-language Indian magazines were raving about the new mind-set of young Indians.
India Today
, one of the country’s most widely read publications, expanded its popularity with cover stories that claimed to capture “the new Indian woman” or “the new attitudes to sex in India.” One article found that more than 40 percent of women favor intercaste marriage and that the vast majority want to work after their weddings. I didn’t put much stock in the findings, though, because the survey was anonymous and the sample ignored rural and uneducated women—the vast majority of Indians.

India Today
’s annual “Sex Survey” issue was consistently awash with sensational statistics: Almost 40 percent of men in Delhi have had an extramarital affair, it declared one year, and 30 percent of Indian women approve of “kinky sex.” Of course, the same survey found that only 16 percent of women nationwide had their first sex with boyfriends, rather than husbands, and that one out of every ten Indian women between the ages of thirty-five and forty was still a virgin. So much for the prosex Indian woman of today.

For help sorting out Indian attitudes to sex, I kept turning to Bollywood, which the acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer Sudhir Kakar calls “the primary vehicle for shared fantasies” of the subcontinent. “Hindi films may be unreal in a rational sense, but they are certainly not untrue,” he writes. Bollywood has ample evidence of the same confusion and insecurity I saw in Geeta and Parvati.

The historical epic
Jodhaa Akbar
, for instance, is an unlikely canvas
for female sexual liberation. It’s a story about the purest form of Indian arranged marriage, a sixteenth-century political alliance between a Hindu princess and a Muslim Mogul emperor. Jodhaa, the princess character, sings the film’s first love song not to her lover but to the deity Krishna. Jodhaa only begins to love her Muslim husband after he shows that he will allow her to worship her own gods, rather than taking on his religion. This is to be expected from a good pious virgin, but what is not to be expected is her obvious sexual attraction to her new husband. In one scene, the camera pans the length of the emperor’s muscular body as he practices sword fighting alone in a verdant courtyard. The demure Jodhaa eyes him longingly through a gauzy curtain, her eyes following the streaks of sweat pooling on the small of his back.

Girlfriend
(named for the English word, because there is no comparable Hindi word) goes even further: It gives Bollywood its first—and some of its only—gratuitous scenes of lesbian lust. Depicting a female character expressing desire for another woman is still considered shocking—after all, homosexuality is a criminal act in India, where an 1861 British-era law prohibiting “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal” remains on the books. At the end of
Girlfriend
, sexy scenes or no, the lesbian character is pushed out of a window to her death by a rescuing hero. The highest-profile Bollywood film dealing with homosexuality to date, the 2008
Dostana
(Friendship), is about two straight guys
pretending
to be gay.

Bollywood is only very slowly inching out of its conservative comfort zone. In today’s mainline films, characters occasionally fall in love with someone from the “wrong” caste or religion, but they almost always come back around to family and tradition, as in Shah Rukh Khan’s 2008 blockbuster
Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
(A Match Made by God). When the film’s heroine, Taani, starts taking dance lessons in a bid to spice up her dull housewifely existence, she falls for a flirtatious dancer in ripped jeans. He’s the opposite of her bureaucrat husband, Surinder, who wears a bad mustache and high-waisted slacks.