The Hindi-Bindi Club (17 page)

I nibble on my index finger. “What if everyone says
no
?” Each has the option of accepting or declining contact with me.

“We’ll curse their lineage.”

“Mom!”

“Kidding!” She nudges my shoulder.

That evening, I check to see if anyone responded, telling myself it’s probably too early, but just in case…“Oh! Oh! Look!” Chills race up and down my arms, and I tap the screen. “Someone accepted!”

My mother comes running. “Who is it?” She peers over my shoulder as I break into a huge grin.

“The architect,” we say in unison.

“
Chalaa,
Kiran-
bai
.” She pats my hand. “You better get ready to milk your cows and goats.”
Bai
means lady; it’s also the polite way to address one’s maid.

“Eight maids-a-milking…” I hum. “I don’t believe I’m saying this, but…this is exciting.”

“It is! I never dreamed I would arrange
your
marriage.”

“Semi-arrange.”

“Semi-arrange.” She smiles. “It’s really just matchmaking. Parents help make the introductions. What you decide to do after that is up to you.”

It doesn’t sound at all strange when she puts it like that. The irony is, I heard these exact words growing up but couldn’t get past the “ick” factor. I’m ashamed to admit that, more than once, I stuck my index finger in my mouth and made gagging noises when my parents suggested pairing me with a “nice Indian boy.” In my paltry defense, the Indian immigrant community was
much
smaller back then. All the nice Indian boys I knew felt like cousins to me. We called each other’s parents
auntie
and
uncle,
after all. And last I checked, “our people” didn’t do that—no cousin intermarriage. Obviously, it wasn’t the right time.

Over the next days, I’m floored at the number of contacts that pour in from the matrimonial website. People I contacted. People who contact me. To keep everyone straight, my mother and I make handy-dandy folders, separating each profile into YES, NO, MAYBE. People think I get my anal-retentiveness from my father, when really, it’s Mom. Obsessive-compulsiveness I get from Dad.

“Thank you for sharing this with me,” my mom says. “It’s nice to be a part of it.”

“An integral part,” I say. “Thank
you, Mummyji
.” I show off my (very limited) Hindi. The suffix -
ji
denotes respect. “Couldn’t do it without you.”

I
think of all the times my mother has said, “Kiran, learn at least the
basics
of Indian cooking. It’s a mother’s duty to teach her daughter.”

A mother’s duty to pass along her wisdom before she dies.

This is the reason she’s writing, recording her recipes, I realize. But recipes aren’t all that my mother has to impart. It hits me, the sheer magnitude of how much I don’t know, how much I still have to learn, how much I can
only
learn from her and no one else. All the stories I haven’t heard. The family history. The life lessons.

Deliberately, I lend a hand in the kitchen, try to take an interest, or at least “fake it until I feel it” for her benefit.

This morning, we’re making
kheer,
a holiday dessert. To many,
kheer
is a kind of rice pudding, but in my family it’s a porridge of vermicelli—chockful of pistachios and golden raisins, and laced with fragrant cardamom and saffron threads.

I’m assigned to spice preparation, the old-fashioned way, which Mom maintains is the best way to achieve optimal flavor. With a brass mortar and pestle, I bruise sage-colored cardamom pods, extract their sticky black seeds, and crush them into a fine powder. (Note to self: Grinding spices by hand is a good way to take out pent-up aggression.)

“Mom?” I ask. “How many marriage proposals did you have? Do you remember?”

Stirring a big pot of milk on the stove, she smiles. “I remember. I had six offers before your father.”

“And the others, the rejects? What made them unacceptable?”

“Unsuitable,” she corrects. “Oh, different things.”

And here they are.
Meenal’s Top Five Reasons to Ding an “Unsuitable” Groom Candidate:

1. His family

2. Differing goals

3. Differing values

4. Socioeconomic concerns

5. Horoscopes

According to Mom, the groom’s family was a big, big deal. Living as a joint family
really
meant marrying the boy’s whole family, not just him. “You can imagine the atmosphere of grown women living together. At best, it’s a sorority. At worst, a women’s correctional center. In all cases, the mother-in-law reigns supreme. I remember there was this one boy we all liked, but his mother…” She shudders. “She was a scary character. She asked me to wash my face, so she could see my ‘natural look.’ What she really wanted was to inspect the natural shade of my skin, to make sure I wasn’t wearing a skin-lightening powder. After they left,
Aji
vetoed them.”

“What made Dad stand out from the others?”

“Everything. Our horoscopes matched perfectly—a match made in heaven, according to the stars. Our goals, values, everything matched. His mother was sweet and gentle. Not the domineering type every girl fears will make life miserable for her daughters-in-law. Still,
Ajoba
had some reservations,” she says about my grandfather. “Dad’s family wasn’t well-off financially. His father’s death left him with many responsibilities. And, if we married, he would take me far away. In America, there would be no servants. A wife was expected to do all the domestic labor. I wouldn’t be able to see or talk to my family more than once a year. All these things worried
Ajoba,
but when Dad came to the house, he so impressed everyone…. He turned all the minuses into pluses!

“His family was humble but cultured. His profession and the lure of an American green card made him a catch. Though America was far from my family, it was also far from his. I could run my own household. I wouldn’t have servants, but I would have modern conveniences. Refrigerator, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, vacuum cleaner. It sounded very exciting, like a movie.
Ajoba
saw Dad as a practical boy with great potential.
Aji
noted Dad was tall, fair, and handsome. That didn’t hurt.”

I laugh. “I’ll bet.” I recall many a time when my gray-haired granny swooned over the popular Hindi film hero Amitabh Bachchan, and she likened my father’s appearance to the star’s.

I learn my parents “interviewed” each other before they agreed to marry. They also had a chance to talk alone. The adults told them to go out onto the balcony. That way, they could keep an eye on them—in those days, girls of marriageable age from good families were always chaperoned to protect their reputations, their honor. They couldn’t risk anyone questioning the girl’s virtue. That would ruin the family’s name and the girl’s chances for a good match, as no decent family wanted an “impure” wife for their son. Of course, such impurities didn’t tarnish the halos of angel sons one bit.

Bam-bam-bam!
I clobber spices with my mallet, er, pestle.

Mom tells me she and Dad were both very nervous and trying hard not to show it. They knew that was the only conversation they’d have before they had to make up their minds, make their decisions. Dad was only in town a few weeks—Harvard’s winter break—and he planned to return to Boston a married man, not uncommon, even for today’s modern arranged marriages. Mind-boggling, I think, what little interaction the couples have before arranged marriages…and the enormous success rates. Obviously, there’s something to it.

Outside, the clouds move in, a thick wall blocking the sun, and the kitchen darkens. We flick on the lights, recessed bulbs over the range and stained-glass lamps that hang over the center island, creating a cozy glow. In the cocoon of the kitchen with my mom, I have the same snuggly feeling as curling into bed with a good book on a rainy day…only better.

I ask her, “Did you discuss any deal-breakers beforehand? Things you wouldn’t tolerate in a marriage?”

No shocker:
Dad said that while he respected modern career women, he didn’t want to marry one. He wanted a wife who would be content as a homemaker, so if Mom was even remotely thinking of working outside the home one day, she should do them both a favor and marry someone else.

Shocker:
Mom said that if her husband hit her, even once, she’d leave. No apologies. No second chances. She would pack up her bags and children and go back to her parents—she’d live with society shunning her before she died in an abusive home.

Hearing this, my mouth gapes. “That was
bold
.”

She grimaces. “It was, wasn’t it? I might not have thought to say it, or had the courage, but my friend Usha was killed in a dowry death.”

“Dowry? But I thought…Am I off in my time line? Didn’t they make dowry illegal before then?”

“It was illegal, the same way speeding’s illegal. It still happens. Often.”

With Usha, her in-laws kept demanding money and gifts from her family, and sons from her. She wasn’t conceiving, and her monster-in-law was in the habit of regularly caning her, so it wasn’t any stretch of the imagination when Usha “accidentally” died from burns in a kitchen fire.

“You always read about dowry deaths in
The Times of India,
” Mom says, “but that was the first time it happened to someone I knew, from a supposedly good family.”

“How awful,” I say.

She nods. “From start to finish. Usha tried to go back to her parents many times, but they wouldn’t have her. They said her place was with her husband, and she must have brought the punishment on herself. If not in the present, then in a past lifetime—bad
karma
. They were very orthodox. They believed once parents gave a girl away in marriage, she wasn’t their daughter anymore. They had no rights or responsibilities.”

“So they just washed their hands of her?”

“Sadly, yes.”

I close my eyes. “Man.”

“Now,
Aji
and
Ajoba
were traditional about most things, as you know, but this was an issue where they were
very
progressive. They sat me down and told me in no uncertain terms that a wife’s duty does
not
include abuse. It was one thing to be willing to die for your husband, and another to die at his hand. If I ever found myself in that situation, I was to come home immediately,” she pronounces the word
im-ME-jet-ly,
“or I should send word to them, and
Ajoba
and my brothers would come and get me, with the police if necessary. I’d always be welcome in their home.”

“Good for them! And good for you, too, for putting it out there with Dad. I had no idea—”

“Not just Dad. I told every boy who came to see me.”

I’m floored—
beyond
floored—by her revelations. There have been times when I’ve thought my mother was a door-mat, when she put up with things I never would, deferred to my father as lord and master even when she knew he was wrong. But, like me, my parents were molded by the culture in which
they
were raised. They had their own benchmarks, values, challenges to the status quo. For her time and place, her generation of Indian women, my mom
did
stand up for herself, assert herself in ways many others wouldn’t have, even today, even in
this
country.

I look at her anew and say, “That couldn’t have been easy, sticking your neck out like that.”

“It was a calculated risk,” she says, explaining she didn’t want to be branded unmarriageable.

A girl who came across too headstrong, too liberated from tradition, could be perceived as a threat to family harmony, especially in a joint family with its existing hierarchy. But Mom wanted her marriage to have the best possible foundation, best chances of success, so it was critical both sides, girl’s and boy’s, understood what they were signing up for, made sure they were compatible.

“Here, you talk about
love
. There, it’s
compatibility
. Love’s fickle. Compatibility endures, sustains marriages,” she says. “Here, marriage is about the two people on the wedding cake. Couples don’t need permission slips from their parents. Families have a lower priority than the couple. But in India, marriage is the joining of two families, a strategic alliance. The couple’s a lower priority than the family as a whole, and permission slips are essential. Understand, Kiran, it was only because my parents dared to stick their necks out that I could. You think of parents as a net that traps you. For Dad and me, parents were our safety nets. We wouldn’t have dared walk the tightrope of life without their support.”

I squirm in discomfort.
Guilty as charged.

M
idway through the
kheer,
Mom asks me to take over for her. She raps the wooden spoon against the rim of the milk pot, then hands it to me with instructions to stir every few minutes and make sure I scrape the bottom and sides. We trade places, and she flops onto my vacated barstool.

Concerned, I ask, “You okay?”

She nods. “It’s just frustrating not to have the stamina.”

“Patience, Mom. You’re doing great. I mean it. But you can’t overdo. Listen to your body. If you need to rest, rest. You want to go lie down for a while? I can finish the
kheer
.”

She laughs. “You and what personal chef?”

“Very funny.”

She writes the recipe as we go, refusing my suggestion to dictate directions I can jot on scrap paper, then follow while she naps. “My body’s tired, but my mind isn’t,” she says. “I need you to talk to me. Wear out my brain like you usually do.”

“Hey!” I lift my chin. “I resemble that remark!”

She smiles and gives me instructions for the vermicelli. Since I can’t cook and talk at the same time, I focus on the
kheer
until I get to a place where all I have to do is stir and scrape the pot again. “Mom?” I ask once I’m on cruise control. “Can I ask you a personal question…?” I hasten to add, “You don’t have to answer, but it would help me if you did.”