But as I read on, I was captivated by the writer’s lovable, engaging persona. By the end, you are rooting for her, a successful, New York-based Indian American journalist in her thirties with gorgeous parents who, while doting on her, are edgy about her failure to find a husband.
I was almost willing India, to which she has travelled from New York in search of a partner, to throw up someone who could fulfil her heart’s desire and justify the touching hope she had placed in the country.
This hope had prompted her to uproot herself from New York after more than a year of serious but fruitless, bewildering dating. Jain migrates in reverse, coming back to the country her parents had left decades ago to escape small-town ennui and suffocation for the US.
Anita Jain begins by chronicling her efforts to find a man she could marry in New York. Her parents cannot understand why, having given their daughter so much freedom, she has never met a suitable boy. For a couple who have enjoyed four decades of marital bliss, this is inexplicable.
It takes courage to confess failure in romance but Jain is honest. "I couldn’t even get someone to call me back after a date, let alone marry me," she writes. Ironical and self-deprecating, she describes the string of American men she meets in her quest for love. None of these culminates in anything lasting. Fed up with meeting female friends in bars for yet another forensic examination of why so-and-so man failed to call, she concludes that maybe her mother’s description of arranged marriages—"it’s not that there isn’t love, it’s just that it comes after marriage"—is not so outlandish after all. She flies to India to search for a husband.
On her arrival in Gurgaon, she stays for a while with a young couple who have had an arranged marriage. It’s a measure of Jain’s perspicacity that she offers insights into arranged marriages, a topic on which it is hard to say anything new.
The husband, Ashok, tells her he had always wanted an arranged marriage because he thought of them as ‘romantic enterprises’. His father, soon after an arranged marriage, used to talk of the ‘magic’ of discovering something new about a spouse each day. Ashok tells Jain: "He (his father) would tell me how he rushed home from work with a spring in his step to see his young wife."
Jain observes the ‘new India’ where young people date, have casual sex, drink, dance, divorce, and enjoy the occasional spliff, where gays are open and relaxed, where the zeitgeist is an exhilarating ‘anything is possible’, one now missing in parts of the West, and where young Indians manage effortlessly to fuse tradition with Western ideas.
As she paints a fascinating portrait of a society in flux, Jain is fascinated by the people she meets. Compared with her uneventful, monochrome childhood in American suburbia, the lives of Indians seem immensely richer and more complex. After listening to a potential Kashmiri beau talk of his family’s Sufi background, his upbringing amid the backdrop of insurgency, and the forthcoming wedding of his sister where the wazwan consists of 36 dishes for 5,000 guests, she looks back at her prosaic childhood environment. "What can I tell him of my feasts while growing up? Racing to Taco Bell in my best friend’s Ford Mustang after school, singing along to Wham?"
Her encounters with potential husbands are wittily recounted. Most are one-to-one meetings. However, when her parents come over to India to turbo-charge the search, she takes them along for a meeting. To her surprise, the chubby suitor has also brought his parents along. "My father speaks with his father. And I had thought it was infantilising to meet a suitor with my parents. Now the boy and I are both here with parents. We are doubly infantilised. We are mute, like toddlers on a playdate".
Read Marrying Anita for a refreshing account of the marriage and social scene in India seen through the eyes of a woman with a formidable intelligence, abundant charm and a big heart.
