Chapter 3
Mismatched Expectations
The scene I imagined of your first meeting with Papa was cinematic: Papa’s family sat with their feet touching the cool marble floor, sipping chai and making small talk with Nanaji and your other relatives in a living room in New Delhi. When you walked into the room, time stopped. A fairy in a lavender organza sari floated in, a face that was all moon-shaped eyes. Your lunar glow lit up the room. You possessed the specific idealized beauty of a Bollywood heroine: hair like strands of diamonds; a figure slim and slight like a hummingbird’s; and, most important by India’s standards, skin the color of gold-dipped pearls. I have seen the photos of you; I see what Papa must have seen: redemption, power, conquest, validation. A woman so beautiful that she could turn even an outcast into an envied man.
Many of my friends balked at the idea of arranged marriages, but I found their shock misplaced. What I saw in American romance movies seemed absurd. In The Notebook, a boy and a girl meet as teenagers, and they fight and make up and fight and make up over a summer. When she leaves town, he writes her letters every day for years and even builds her a house. They called this romantic. In Sleepless in Seattle, a woman obsesses over a man she does not know, impressing some idea she has of him upon a voice she hears on the radio, an infatuation that culminates in a meeting. This, too, they called love. At least in the South Asian tradition, we are up front about the spectacle and the arbitrariness of romantic love. At least we mutually agree on the objects of obsession before acting upon our compulsions and fantasies. All of this is to say that, as a girl, I found the story of your marriage romantic.
You met one or two times again after that. Papa asked you if you were willing to move to Canada with him. “I will go wherever my husband goes,” you said. Within weeks, you were married.
On your wedding night, you wore a scarlet lehenga and posed on a bed with wooden posts that jutted toward the ceiling like minarets. When I first saw the photo as a teenager, I blushed. Carnal red envelops the entire picture, all fabric. Only your face and bangle-adorned forearms are visible. The photo is modest yet feels too intimate for anyone else—let alone your daughter—to see. It is the only photo I have ever seen of you in which your eyes hunger with desire. I have thought often about the woman in that photo: what she yearned for and what she believed she was about to find. I have long wanted to meet her. I want to understand what happened to her.
I cannot imagine the loneliness and fear you must have felt when you first reached Canada at age twenty-three, and for a long time I did not even try. The stories of your life as a recent immigrant came to Yush and me as jokes, where your isolation or forced assimilation was always the punch line. Papa said that before you came here, you spoke some primitive small-town dialect, a bastardization of Hindi that he pushed you to correct in order to “communicate better,” as he put it. You were too embarrassed to speak this dialect in front of us, but one time, as teenagers, we begged you to speak it. Around the dinner table, between mouthfuls of dal chawal you had prepared for us, Papa set up the joke—listen to how funny this sounds—gearing up your nasally speech as the gag. You spoke. We laughed.
I never heard you speak that way again.
That language was Awadhi, an ancient tongue that told your people’s stories before the British ravaged your lands. A language of rajas and poets that, while still spoken in parts of Northern India, had been pushed aside after the colonizers arrived. In our house, Papa was the colonizer. I wish now I had grown up hearing the ancient song of my ancestors that lives within you.
In India, your male relatives escorted you everywhere in public. I don’t think you had ventured beyond your country’s borders before your brief honeymoon in Nepal with Papa. Shortly after you arrived in Canada, Papa took you to downtown Toronto and then left you there alone. In an era without cellphones or the Internet, he went off and told you to find your own way back. You were stranded in the middle of a large city full of people who did not look like you or talk like you. You must have been terrified. When he told us this story, Papa emphasized his wit, as if this was a clever way to teach someone “how to be independent.” It was his way of saying: You’re in my country now, and I control you.
Papa said that when you first came to Canada you two “fought all the time,” and you chimed in and your eyes widened, embellishing the story with your own line, “Oh, I would get so mad!” and then Papa laughed and so did we. Now I wonder where that anger of yours went. I wonder if the anger I thought I learned from watching Papa instead came from you. Trapped, without an exit, transferred from mother to daughter through the secrets we were both meant to keep.
You relied on letters in blue air-mail envelopes to communicate with your siblings in India. As a girl, I followed you into your bedroom and sat down on the bed next to you while you unfolded paper that smelled of mothballs. You told me what the letters said, explaining to me who was my Mamaji or my Mausiji. I had met my uncles and aunts when I was a baby, but I couldn’t remember them. One time a letter came and, when you opened it, your face fell. As you looked at scrawling that I could not yet read, I felt confused. How could something that usually made you so happy could now steal all of your joy? Your grandmother had died, you told me as you sobbed. I wanted to console you, but I didn’t know the woman you mourned.
Back then, we staged phone calls to India like a theatrical production. We planned them in advance, and whenever someone picked up, the four of us huddled around the phone and talked fast and loudly—partly because of the excitement of getting through, partly because we had to yell to compensate for the poor connection, and partly because we never knew when the line would cut. Aside from a few visits you made to India after marriage, these scattered phone calls and letters were the only contact you had with your home in your first decade here.
I never asked you what hopes and dreams buoyed you amid the all-consuming loneliness and grief of leaving your family and your country behind. I had just assumed that the West, the land of opportunity, was so obviously the best place to live. The idea that the West represents modernity and the East is stuck in some primitive, ancient past rooted in the West’s orientalist lie. My own assumptions about who you were and what you wanted, founded upon this lie, made it impossible for me to see you beyond the role you played in our household.
When Papa’s sister, my Buaji, asked you why you agreed to marry a stranger who lived in another country, you told her that you wanted to raise a different kind of family—a close, nuclear family unburdened by the drama that came with the joint-family structure you grew up with in India. You once told me that in India, your neighbors were your relatives, but the two families had split the house and cordoned them off with walls. They now rarely spoke to one another. You never explained why. Maybe you thought family unity would be easier to maintain in the West, where women did not live under the control of their husbands’ parents and grandparents in the same house. The simpleness of your want for closeness and autonomy, and all that made that dream impossible for you to attain, guts me now.
Papa said that he entered into an arranged marriage out of respect for Dadiji and Dadaji’s wishes. This was not uncommon. Many South Asian immigrants brokered marriages for their children from their motherland, particularly in the first immigrant generation. Honoring Indian culture, Papa said, was important to him. While his younger siblings eventually lost fluency in Hindi and grew distant from extended family, Papa strained to relearn the language and deepen bonds with relatives, both here and abroad.
But Papa’s siblings had both dated and then married for love. In his family, Papa’s arranged marriage was an outlier. As an adult, I began to ask questions about the stories upon which I had been raised, and Dadaji and Buaji told me a very different account of the brokering of your marriage.
Dadaji had long opposed arranged marriages. His own parents had fallen in love. He believed that people should enter into a marriage of their own accord, when and how and with whom they wanted. It was Papa who, while still in college, approached his father with the request to find a bride in India. Dadaji said no. He did not want to be responsible for his son’s happiness. “How will I judge whether this girl is good for my son or not? I cannot do that,” he told me. “Besides, why are you in such a rush?” he said he asked Papa. “Wait until you have a job and a house to support a new bride.”
I do not know what India represented to Papa, but I suspect he carried nostalgia for a place that never existed, a utopia created by the frozen impressions and desires of a nine-year-old boy who moved to a white country that shunned him. “Do you know why I want to go to India and get married?” Buaji recalled Papa asking her. “Because girls raised here are ruined, like you.” She shot back, “You’re looking for a servant, not a wife.” Papa seemingly envisioned Indian-born-and-bred women as pure, like the portrayals of Sita from the Ramayana popularized by India’s Hindu elite. In the version of the ancient epic that I grew up hearing, Rama repeatedly tests the commitment of his wife, Goddess Sita, daughter of Mother Earth, demanding she prove her purity by walking through fire and later banishing her in a forest over concerns about her chastity. Papa was going to India to find a chaste, obedient, devoted woman. A woman uncorrupted by the West.
In Speaking the Unspeakable, sociologist Margaret Abraham explains the tragic consequences of the mismatch of expectations between men like Papa and women like you: Many South Asian women who married South Asian men from the West, as you did, carried expectations that they might have more opportunities here. This is what colonialism advertises. But South Asian men from the West who sought South Asian brides in the East, as Papa did, often played out their orientalist fantasies of a demure, subservient woman who could restore the brown masculinity robbed by white men in the West—also as colonialism advertises. You had been taught that most obstacles in marriage resulted from a woman’s failure to please her husband, understanding that divorce was a form of social death. On top of that, you were still a girl in many ways, never having played out the fantasies of intimacy with an actual man. Your family had only a few days to vet this stranger and his family. Then, after marriage, you were removed from your culture, country, and family, entirely dependent upon your husband for your immigration status, income, and access to community. These conditions made you especially vulnerable. Everything was stacked against you, but you had no way of knowing this.
After Dadaji refused to arrange his son’s marriage, Papa apparently threatened Dadaji with an ultimatum: Find me a bride in India, or I’ll marry someone here that you don’t like, without your input. The threat was not idle. He told Dadaji that he knew of an Indo–Guyanese woman who was interested in him. In the upper-caste North Indian community’s eyes, this woman would lower the family’s status, because South Asians came to the Caribbean as indentured laborers when slavery was supplanted. Papa planned to marry her if his parents refused to comply with his wishes, he said. I was shocked to learn that Papa was willing to gamble with both his future and someone else’s in such a profound, devastating, lasting way, and I was astounded that he manipulated bigotry to call my grandparents’ bluff.
Dadiji was seemingly unbothered by Papa’s disturbing ultimatum, elated that her son sought a traditional arranged Hindu marriage. Dadaji, pressured by his wife’s excitement and scared to say no to his brilliant eldest son, relented. He went to India to help Papa find a bride. But on one condition: Don’t bring her to Canada until you have graduated, have a job, and can provide her a real home. Papa promised.
The family could barely afford the trip to India. Dadaji left his computer-consulting business in the charge of one of Papa’s friends. When he came back, he had lost all of his clients. The business dissolved.
Papa never told me about the ultimatum he gave Dadaji. He never uttered a word about the promise that Dadaji said he made. He did once mention dating a woman before meeting you. She wanted to marry him, he said, but he was just having fun. It seemed wrong to string someone along like that, I said, but Papa said that it was fine because he told her from the get-go that he’d never marry her. I remember feeling bad for that woman.
Papa bragged about intentionally rushing your visa—an affair that could easily take a year—with such expediency that you came to Canada within months of marriage. Your family in India was impressed. Given this, I find it hard to believe that he’d ever planned to honor the promise he made to Dadaji.
The West was the land of decadence. I imagine that your family thought this Canadian man and his family bore significant wealth. I don’t know what Papa told you about Canada or where you’d be staying, but you must have been shocked when you discovered that your new husband, still in college, had no stable source of income and lived in an apartment with other men. You moved in with his parents in the suburbs while he lived in another city to finish school. But he was a good man. He had been vetted and it had been decided. To question that goodness was to question the entire process, the entire world, and the judgment of everyone that you loved and trusted.
Papa twisted the criticisms of his decision-making into personal attacks against you: When we were kids, he told us that Dadaji didn’t want Papa to marry you, and he said that Buaji looked down at you as a servant. It was through this lens that you built relationships with your in-laws, burdened by a disprovable, unshakable suspicion that they did not want you here and saw you as beneath them. You had no choice but to take Papa’s words at face value, cementing your loyalty to him as your protector in the face of their harsh judgments.
With the perfect Indian bride by his side, Papa set out to build the perfect Indian American family. Now I wonder if Papa ever thought about what it might mean to raise a daughter in a land of ruined women. Maybe he thought he was powerful enough to keep America from corroding me, that he could galvanize my inherent Indianness, whatever that meant to him, like an alloy coating.