The Marriage Bureau for Rich People

Visakhapatnam is also called Vizag. On one side of Vizag is the coast and on the other side are green mountains. The population of Vizag is 3.5 million people.When I was younger, it used to be much cooler and Vizag was known as a retirement town, but now the number of people has grown a lot, and every summer it becomes very hot.

There are many tourist spots in and around Vizag. Tribal people live in the forests of Araku Valley. They sometimes come into town wearing colorful clothes to sell brooms, soapnuts, jackfruit, honey, tamarind, and peacock feathers. When I was a little girl, my uncle used to work in the agency that looked after the tribal people. He told me that he used to see tigers when riding in the forest. People don’t see the animals anymore. There are also ancient limestone caves there. We once went there and the guide took us inside. It is very silent and cool in the caves, and massive pillars grow from the floor and from the ceiling toward each other.

The temple at Simhachalam is about one thousand years old. It is a very important temple for Hindus. In Vizag itself, there are three hills—the first has a Hindu temple, the second has the tomb of a Muslim saint and a mosque, and the third has a big church.The papers print stories of riots and communal problems in other parts of India, but we never have such problems in Vizag. People of all religions and castes live together without any trouble. I am proud of this.

The Beach Road is very beautiful.The sand dunes (is that the word?) stretch along the road. If you drive for about fifteen miles on this road, you come to the town of Bhimili. The beach here is really special. It is like a big round circle cut in half. If we ever go there, I try to reach it at two in the afternoon.The fishermen’s boats come to the shore at this time and you get really fresh fish—vanjaram and chanduva are the best, but I don’t know their English names. There is supposed to be a two-hundred-year-old Dutch cemetery in Bhimili, but I have never visited it myself. Some years ago, we were watching a Hindi movie called Silsila, which had a song shot in a big field of bright yellow and red flowers. Rehman told me that these beautiful flowers are called tulips and they grow in the country of those people. I looked but could not find this country called Dutch on the map.

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Most people in Vizag are Hindus, like Aruna, and speak Telugu, the elegant South Indian language of this part of India. An Englishman named C. P. Brown called Telugu the “Italian of the East.”

Is Italian beautiful?

There are many Muslims like me in Vizag, and we speak Urdu. My husband tells me that our beautiful mother tongue, so suited for writing songs and poems, was created in the army camps of the Moghul emperors by soldiers from different countries speaking Persian, Turkish and Hindi. I find this difficult to believe, but sometimes you can see a lovely lotus growing in the middle of a dirty, green pond.

Another thing I find difficult to believe is how English people can get by without words for so many kinds of relatives. Aren’t family relations important in England? For example, when an Englishwoman talks about her grandmother, how will her listener know whether she is talking about her mother’s mother or her father’s mother? Also, we have different words for mother’s brother, father’s younger brother, and father’s older brother, but in English they are all just called “uncle.”

I recently read a joke in English that didn’t make sense to me. The joke was:

How can they make fun of such an important relationship? In Urdu, your son’s mother-in-law is your samdhan.

Another rule in India is that you normally do not call people older than yourself by name. So my younger brother Azhar calls me “aapa” (Urdu) and Vani calls Aruna “akka” (Telugu). Aruna and I call them by their names.

This is a list of some words for relatives:

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There are supposed to be four castes among Hindus—Brahmins, the priestly class; Kshatriyas, or warriors; Vaishyas, or merchants; and Shudras, or workers. The system, of course, is a lot more complicated than this.

There are subcastes within castes, and subcastes within subcastes. As Muslims, we are not part of the caste system, and until my husband started the marriage bureau, I wasn’t fully aware of how complex it all was. Aruna explained to me that the caste system was based on people’s traditional professions. Over thousands of years, the system became rigid and hereditary. When I asked her about subcastes, she said that they too were based on people’s jobs. She said that we might think that all leather workers were one subcaste of Shudras; but within that, the people who tanned leather were a different subcaste from those who made shoes, and they were again different from people who made saddles.

Among Brahmins, too, those who carry out priestly duties like Aruna’s family are Vaidiki Brahmins. They tend to be well versed in Sanskrit. Ramanujam’s family are Niyogi Brahmins.These Brahmins do not officiate at religious functions. They are well educated in English and Telugu and are village heads or clerks and accountants.

The most controversial part of the caste system is, of course, un touchability. The lowest castes, who work in “unclean” professions like handling dead bodies or human waste, are called “scheduled” castes. Hindus from higher castes do not allow the scheduled caste people to come into their houses or even to touch them. In villages, they have to live away from the rest of the people, and there are a lot of restrictions on what they can and cannot do. For example, they cannot use the wells that the other villagers use. Their children may have to sit outside the classroom so that they are away from the upper-caste children. Un touchability is banned, and the government reserves a portion of jobs and college seats for scheduled caste people, but it will take time to get rid of a problem that has grown over two thousand years. Not every upper-caste person is rich, but most lower-caste people are poor.

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I start cooking breakfast between seven and seven-thirty in the morning.When Rehman was a boy and my husband was still in service, I used to start cooking by half past six, but now there is no need to be so early.

We never have the same breakfast two days in a row. If I make parathas one day, I make dosas or idlis the next day. The day after that, I might make upma or pesaratt. To make dosa or idli, I have to soak black-grams for a few hours and wet-grind them into a thick paste the night before, so they ferment. I normally make a chutney as a side dish—coconut and onion are two favorites. Sometimes, I also make sambhar, which is a thick liquid made of lentils, onions, tamarind, and spices. Sambhar can be used as a dip for breakfast or to mix in rice for lunch or dinner. Rasam, on the other hand, is only used for lunch or dinner. It is a thin liquid made with tamarind and spices and used to mix in rice.

In all the years that I’ve been married, I have made sure that my family always ate a hot breakfast before leaving the house—even if it meant waking up at four in the morning if we had to catch an early train. Rehman used to love his breakfast as a boy. Sometimes I get tears in my eyes when I think of him in some small village—what does he eat? How can food prepared in a hotel, without love, stick to his body? No wonder he is so thin. I wish he would get married soon. I will teach his wife how to make all his favorite dishes, just as my mother-in-law taught me all my husband’s likes and dislikes.

When we were younger, we used to eat meat only once a week, and chicken was an occasional treat. Now we have more money and can afford to eat meat more frequently, but as we’ve gotten older, we don’t want to eat rich food so often. We usually eat meat on Sunday. I rarely make a pure meat dish. I mix vegetables and meat—it is tastier that way and cheaper too!

I also make sweets at home sometimes. One pudding that is very easy to make is halwa. This is the method that I use.

INGREDIENTS:

Fine semolina—1 cup (about 200 g)

Sugar—1 cup

Ghee (or unsalted butter)—1/2 cup

Water—2 cups

Cashew nuts—50 g

Raisins—25 g

Cardamom—4 pods

Cloves—4 sticks

Cinnamon—2 pieces

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