Another wedding will soon take place in our family, this time my own. All this excitement is already giving me a very distressing amusement, especially when I am reminded of the time of my cousin, Rachna di’s marriage. It happened almost ten years ago when I visited my mother’s maternal house in a village called Pampur. There I was witness for the first time to the whole groom hunting process which culminates in the sacred tightrope walk of marriage.
******
The boy’s family was sitting in a room decorated especially for them. Within and without the room was a strict silence, but this was not ordinary silence. An expression of heartfelt deference was stuck on the face of each inhabitant in the house of three brothers. I was sitting on the stairs to the terrace when I saw the youngest child of the house entering through the main gate across the verandah with a whistle in her mouth. I knew the kind of brat she was; she started to run about the house blowing the whistle, producing a highly vulgar sound in the holy environment. When she came near me, my aunt made a gesture and I knew what I had to do. I caught her by her skirt and slapped her. Afterwards she cried so loudly that she had to be locked in the most secluded room.
I went into the room where Rachna di was getting dressed up. All her friends, some even from nearby villages had come to help her. Di kept on applying makeup, rubbing fairness cream on each exposed part including her feet. The whole procedure was painfully slow and despairingly long. In the meanwhile, my uncle had knocked on the door several times. At last he grunted outside the door, “Hey Ram, Women and their vanity!”
After the ritual of painting, the ritual of putting on gold began. My uncle and aunt brought all the gold jewellery they had. One of her friends contributed with her ring. Thus, finally di had a ring in two fingers on each hand, two necklaces, heavy earrings, obscenely large nose ring, bangles and of course anklets.
“Oh di, they’ll confuse you for a gold mine!” I said.
Di was looking at her father who looked at all the jewellery with a strange look. His face seemed to say, “So much love for mere metal. Money can buy better things.”
When my uncle had left, di turned to me and spoke, “Don’t you think gold is a strange thing? You can often hear a man complaining against the whole female sex for their obsession with gold, but strangely I have become a gold mine, as you call me, not for my love of gold but to impress those men sitting in the other room, for we all know how much they love gold in such a situation. The meaning of gold can be so very relative.”
She was right. A little while ago when di was putting on makeup, I was actually thinking how she was ruining the image of all women by her ultra-‘feminine’ act. But now I could see that it was a truth that though most of the men show their condemnation for women working hard to enhance their beauty, yet they value beauty, sometimes only beauty, in women. She would certainly get a big chunk of points for clearing the eligibility criteria of beauty.
My cousin had told me a few days back that she would be asked to write a letter in front of the jury as a proof of her literacy, as was the custom. The traditional subject of the letter has been about asking father for money to buy books. Keeping in mind the charm of English language in Indian society, I wrote a letter on the topic in English and di learnt it by heart.
She went through the letter quickly for a revision. Then my aunt put a veil on her head covering her face up to the nose.
“Don’t hide your face after you have made it so beautiful. If you don’t show your face, how does it matter whether you have a face of a woman, hen or cow.” I said and pushed the veil back to the hairline. I also asked her to walk like the woman who had come yesterday asking us to vote her for the post of sarpanch, instead of walking like a snail’s ghost.
Forth she went like an empress, I closely followed. There were four middle aged men, sitting in pairs on either side of a very old man. All of them ran their eyes at once through what di was wearing. One of them asked her to sit. After exchanging pleasantries, the one sitting on the far right asked, “So how much have you studied, child?”
“I have done my graduation in economics.”
“Which college?” asked another.
“Shakti Devi Women’s College.”
“Girls’ or co-ed?”
“Girls’” said di pressing her smile.
All the men nodded in approval at each other, satisfied and relieved at the answer.
“Which division?”
“First.”
They whispered something in each other’s ears and finally the oldest among them spoke, “Now we must see if you can write a letter. What will you write on? Let’s think. Why don’t you write a letter asking your father for money to buy books?”
I smiled at di, who immediately started writing and finished the letter in less than two minutes. When she handed over the letter to the man sitting at the centre, the four others bent over to have a look at it. Sheer surprise trickled down their body. They passed the letter to each other, none of them read it, but simply traversed their eyes over the paper, as if looking at a Chinese painting. Di had passed the literacy test with flying colours and booming crackers.
One of them asked about her interests. Di answered by explaining her love of doing small repair works. She illustrated her reply with some recent instances when she had fixed up her father’s broken tube well and neighbour’s flour mill. Amazed at the answer, one of them asked, “That’s well. But can you balance this man’s work by cooking good food and managing the house?”
As if suddenly reminded of something, my di blushed very artificially and said, “Oh yes, yes. I can.”
Her father pointed at all the snacks and sweets on the table and proudly gave all the credit to his daughter.
******
When those men left, they looked sufficiently happy and all of us expected a ‘yes’ very soon. Dowry was not an issue. After bragging about how God had blessed them with more than they desired, the two parties had settled on an amount with little bargaining. My cousin was also very happy. The boy was called Ranjan. He had dropped out of college in his second year, but had joined his father’s business. He had a wholesale shop of agricultural equipments and sufficiently big farmlands. From what we heard of him he was famous in his neighbourhood for his handsome looks.
Several days had passed, no word came from them. After some more weeks, rumours came that they had started seeing other girls for match.
One day my aunt’s brother, Vibhu da, (as he was universally known) dropped in at midnight. His brother-in-law, that is the husband of my aunt’s and Vibhu da’s sister, lived in Ranjan’s village so he knew why the match was not fixed. He spoke in whispers as all of us sat as audience, “Hai, hai! Sister, you should have taught some sense to your daughter. They didn’t like her manners. They are sure she would create some or the other trouble after marriage. They think she is too clever, how can they trust an English speaking madam in our dear innocent society? What nonsense has she told them about repair work, they don’t need a mechanic in their home. ”
“Of course not! They need a housemaid.” I spoke in a barely audible voice.
Vibhu da was still speaking, “They have come to know that there is a boys’ college just opposite to her college and that she used to go to college everyday; I had told you this didi, now don’t blame me, no girl here goes to college everyday especially when it is so far. Now pay for her boldness. I think they gave too much thought to this, that’s why they connected it to the way she walked in front of them, completely unabashed. They also said that with her manly ways, if she becomes the man of the house, what will remain for their boy?”
******
One day Rachna di announced her plan of visiting her aunt in Ranjan’s village. All of us were shocked beyond any sense of reason. But since the day the match became a dream forever, she had been so upset that nobody dared to reject her wish.
I was asked to accompany her. On visiting the village, we learnt that the boy had been in town for some time and was to return the next day.
The next evening di saw him, walking down the mud lane to his home in dusk. She declared at once- “I will marry him, yes I will.”
******
One night a lot of people sat around a bonfire as the weather was turning chilly. There were women, their men and young people, sitting and gossiping.
Di asked me to sit in the group much against my liking. I had always tried to stay away from huge village gatherings as my clothes would always become a topic of amusement for the village folk. They would say I dress up like a boy. Children with button less shirts and zip less frocks also dared to laugh at me in my face. But di had an aim and she could not hear no. She whispered instructions in my left ear and I started towards my right, deliberately sitting on the edge of the women’s group so that I was near the men’s group.
I selected a young woman who looked at me with intrigue and shouted (to her utter amazement), “Have you heard about that much hyped English letter that di wrote?” She nodded, she had heard about it, perhaps the whole district did.
“Ha! English letter! Any Englishman would have committed suicide after reading that letter. English! Nonsense! Putting together English alphabets and words don’t make English language. Those kind men were too polite to find faults in it, but I am sure they were miffed at my cousin’s attempt to fool them into believing that she could write in English. Well, they have a right to be miffed.”
What followed was like a chemical reaction. Sodium and water and a blast. News and a man and immediate message transfer. Out of the crowd of men, a tall man shot up and ran in the direction of Ranjan’s house.
The next morning when I was helping the granny of the house in shifting dung cakes from the kitchen wall where they were stuck to the far corner of the kitchen, di came panting and dragged me out of the house without any time to compose myself or even wear my own slippers instead of the large borrowed ones I was wearing.
The next moment I found myself sitting at the back of a horse tonga, with my feet hanging down. We were on a gravel path to the town which went by the local market. My cousin was on my left. Her face had a marble expression, as if she were focusing on something, not outside but inside her mind, but surely there was a sly look.
My elbow bumped against the iron support on my side. I shrieked with pain. Di’s expression changed, something cunning was mixed with deep sadness. She spoke:
“We womenfolk have arms like flower stalks, that we can use them for doing nothing but household drudgery. This is the reason behind the divinely ordained division of labour, only man with his metal arms can work on switch-operated mills while women with tender arms can do just manual grinding. Why just that, we women are such pathetic defence less creatures. There is not even a single woman who can even think of using broken bangles to poke the eyes of her harasser or use mangalsutra to strangle her drunken husband who comes home and beats her.”
I made a face to point out the flaw in her argument. She, a woman, had thought exactly what according to her no woman could think of. But just then, one of my slippers threatened to fall off my feet. I shifted uncomfortably when di started again, “Now look at you, how foolish you are! Is there any sense in your wearing slippers that don’t fit you at all? Now to correct silly girls like you, the great men of our society would have to make a divine law to be passed on to later generations as a part of their ancient inheritance, and make it virtuous in a woman to wear slippers around her neck when sitting at the back of a tonga, or simply make it immoral for a woman to sit with her legs hanging. No wonder men are always right. And women always wrong.”
We got down just as suddenly when we reached the market. When di was paying the fare, I looked at the two men and then looked at di. Her face betrayed that she knew exactly who were sitting in the front seat. So I was not her audience, they were, Ranjan’s father and Ranjan himself.
******
My Rachna di’s marriage was fixed with Ranjan. This time the visitor’s were only Ranjan’s mother and father. Unlike the previous visit when everyone had turned quiet in deference to the five men’s mighty presence, this time the house was echoing with laughter and cheer. Di’s soon to be father-in-law came and blessed her by saying, “Let the woman who understands womanly virtues and exercises them while respecting and holding sacred to the heart the divinely sanctioned boundaries have a blessed married life and achieve love and care of her husband in return of her pious single hearted devotion.”
The old man had been too detailed in his blessings but had certainly missed a lot of factual details like the exact nature of the virtues he talked of and the parameters of the boundaries he talked of and the magnitude of devotion required to receive worthy amount of love and care.
He continued, “Why did you lie that you knew English, my daughter? Why did you claim to have technical knowledge when you are, er, a completely normal woman? For a woman there is nothing to be ashamed of in accepting that she does not equal her man in her knowledge or is dependent on him. What is the man for if the woman is self-sufficient?”
******
Since she got married, I have talked to di only once. It was around eight or nine months after her marriage. She told me that her husband turned out to be very poor at writing skills and could not keep account of transactions at his shop and was dependent on employees who thoroughly cheated him. Since the shop is in town, sometimes her husband stays there for some days together. Soon after her marriage she started visiting the shop occasionally for a few hours simply to visit her husband or to accompany him but she slowly took command over the whole decision making. Lately, the shop has expanded to keep more agricultural items. Her father-in-law doesn’t know the reality and believes he is an indulgent father-in-law to allow the couple some time together away from home.
So, the old man is happy to see how his son glutted with manly virtues has made progress after Laxmi came to their house through marriage and praises the glory of God after seeing how his daughter-in-law with nothing but devotion in her heart has promoted good works in her husband.
__END__
